Asa MathatSetup was easy on both of my test Macs. Apple’s new Photos app for Mac devotes more of the screen to your pictures. In my opinion, it achieved all three.These are similar to the icons across the bottom of the screen in the iPhone and iPad Photos app.The exception is the Projects button, which brings up things like paper books and cards, as well as slideshows. The new Photos sweeps that all away, while retaining major features.The main screen of Photos has a toolbar with just four big buttons: Photos, Shared, Albums and Projects. In my search tests — “Steve Jobs,” “Beijing” and “wedding” — I was quickly able to narrow things down by date, name, location and more.As for clutter: While iPhoto started out as a simple program 13 years ago, over time it acquired so many options and controls that it became complex. And search is more sophisticated.For instance, even in Years view, which features thousands of tiny thumbnails, you can simply hold down the touchpad and scroll to see larger views of each image, and then stop pressing down to enlarge it to full size.And full size in Photos is larger and more pleasing, surrounded by fewer distractions, than it was in iPhoto.In general, I loved the speed and ease of the new, simpler controls in Photos. The last is Years, which is just what it sounds like.These are all meant to make it easier to find photos in large libraries. It might, for instance, contain the entire vacation. The next, called Collections, is broader. One, called Moments, gathers photos taken at the same time and place — for example, a museum you visited on a given day during vacation.ICloud Photo LibraryYou don’t have to use the new iCloud photo-syncing service with Photos — but if you do, there are advantages.All your full-sized original photos are stored in the cloud, and the local copies on your mobile devices are scaled-down versions that take up less space but are optimized to look good on the device’s screen.Not only that, but edits made on one Apple device almost instantly show up on all the others. I found both results pleasing.All in all, I found Photos to be such an improvement over iPhoto that I wonder why Apple didn’t create it years ago. In another, taken at a baseball game, it not only straightened the image, but made it horizontal instead of the dreaded iPhone vertical. In a shot of my daughter-in-law, Auto Crop made it so her image filled more of the frame. You can also white-balance photos.My personal favorite was a new one called Auto Crop, which not only resizes a photo, but straightens it and tries to make it look more professional — all in one click. Apple stresses that editing isn’t meant to be the main purpose of Photos, but the company has worked to add some options.The finest editing controls appear first in simple formats, with sliders for things like “Light.” But you can click to expose more, such as highlights and shadows, each with its own sliders.
Photo Editing Apps Computer Mac Devotes MoreMany, many photos went missing from my mobile devices, and photo edits wouldn’t sync.Apple asked me to send them logs from my Mac for diagnostic purposes, and I did. But then, after a couple days, the process simply froze. And, for me, it didn’t, until Apple fixed it, after I brought my problem to the company’s attention while reporting this review.At first, my MacBook Air uploaded pictures to the cloud slowly but steadily. Storage space for your photos is shared with storage space for other iCloud services like Mail, backups and documents.But the cloud library’s advantages only matter if it works. Apple gives you five gigabytes of iCloud storage free, but charges from 99 cents a month for 20GB, up to $20 a month for one terabyte. The new Mac Photos app now looks more like the iPhone and iPad apps. Adobe reader download macAnd even when syncing was working, it was fairly slow, so my devices still aren’t all in sync.But one of my Re/code colleagues has also switched on iCloud Photo Library, and her transition was smooth. After investigating, Apple performed a workaround to resume the syncing.I’m not sure exactly what to blame, but I doubt an average consumer who wasn’t writing a review would have been able to quickly resolve such a problem. They explained that when the new syncing service encountered the many duplicates, it stopped syncing.
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