Mac OS X Photos
Before the main meeting started we shared who had had a chance to view or try on the Apple watch at the Danbury Apple Store, although you can’t yet purchase one in the store. Right now you would need to order one online, although so far none of us have done so. When I went, I was a little surprised to see that they even had the 18-karat gold models on display.
As the main topic of the April meeting we explored the newly released Mac OS X Photos application that replaces iPhoto when you upgrade to Yosemite 10.10.3. If you have seen the Photos app on an iPhone or iPad, the Photos application on the Mac will look familiar, but it will take some time to figure out what happened to the things you were familiar with in iPhoto.
Photos are now organized into Moments, Collections, and Years. Moments group photos that were taken on the same day, and will take the name of the location(s) where they were taken, if available. Otherwise they’ll display just the date as a label. Use the left navigation arrow to see Collections which group Moments over the course of several consecutive days you may have spent in one place, or just an assortment of random photos scattered over a month if your picture taking was sporadic. Navigate left again to Years to see an overview of your photos by thumbnails grouped by year.
Next to the Photos tab is Shared, where you’ll find all the photos you’ve shared. The next tab is Albums. There are albums with self-explanatory names automatically created, called All Photos, Faces (which you may remember from iPhoto), Last Import, Panoramas, and Videos. Then there are albums that you have created yourself, either carried over from iPhoto, or that you newly create in Photos. One is specially named iPhoto Events, which is where you’ll find all your Events that you created in iPhotos. The Projects tab is where you create calendars and photo books to be edited.
Wherever you see a photo you can double-click to see a maximized view of it. Then you can click on the Edit button to try and improve a photo. The quickest way is the one-touch Enhance tool, but there are also Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust, Retouch, and Red-eye tools. Someone mentioned that there was a way in iPhoto to quickly compare the before and after view of an edited photo. We had to do some research to find out that in Photos, pressing the M key would toggle back and forth between the before and after view. To go back to previous edits just use the undo key command + Z, or just click Revert to Original to lose all edits.
One member who had not yet upgraded mentioned that he had multiple libraries in iPhoto, which he could select by pressing the Shift key on startup. In Photos we found out that it detects when you have multiple libraries and show a list of them so that you can select which one you want to work with.