Gadgetory

this is Dan Seaford with the verge and I'm taking a look at the new Photos app for Mac essentially replaces iPhoto and aperture on the desktop it's a completely redesigned brand new app designed to match the new Yosemite aesthetic you've got your control bar and menu bars are all at the top here it's much cleaner flatter design that really showcases your photos much better than iPhoto did you can see it's a lot faster with a large photo library something that iPhoto always kind of choked on you can zoom in and zoom out and view your collections and timelines and things like that you can also do some cool things like hover over and few images through kind of a loop feature here so you can find the exact image you're looking for the other really big new feature that come with photos is the integration with iCloud photos which lets you access your shared photo streams you can see photos that have been liked and favorited and commented and things like that you could synchronize all of your photos and videos from your Mac up to your iCloud account and then access them on your iPhone and iPad it actually uses your iCloud storage that you purchase it doesn't have an arbitrary time limit or number limit like my photo stream used to other parts of the app you've got albums which are very familiar if you have iPhoto and you use it now and you upgrade to the new Photos app all of your albums will be imported the same goes for aperture you've got various types of organization at the top for different videos slow motion time-lapse etc and then finally there's also the project's tab here which has been kind of revamped apples still offering a lot of things like photo books and panoramic prints and things like that so all of that stuff still remains one of the big new features available on photos are the new editing tools the tools look very similar to what are available on iOS but they're more powerful on the Mac there's a new automatic crop mode which will automatically find the horizon and rotate the photo and use the rule of thirds to compose the photo for you which is pretty cool and then there's these new intelligent sliders so you can use one slider to control a bunch of parameters at once and it preserves the highlights in your photo and other types of things and then you can go in and do some fine-tuning if you want as well but this is really great for beginners who are not familiar with these types of photo tools to just easily quickly fix their photos there's also a new black and white feature which lets you use a slider to control different types of black and white processing like different filter emulations and things like that and then you can also control the type of film simulation that it's doing here as well but it's all is pretty simple and quick and easy to use really designed for beginners of photography not for pros at this point all of your edits also sync over to the iPhone and the iPad so you can see this photo here that I edited on the Mac it's now also edited on my iPhone and I can go ahead and make continue to make edits that will sync back to the Mac so if I reset this particular photo you can see on the Mac here it resets to how it was originally overall photos is a pretty big improvement over iPhoto in terms of user experience and features and ease of use if you've been using iPhoto already there's really little reason for you to dislike and not upgrade if you've been using aperture and you've been like the more powerful tools there you're probably going to find photos a little lacking at this point and professionals are going to want to use some more powerful programs Apple is releasing a seed to developer starting today with a public beta coming soon and expect the full release later this spring