Snell - Photos for Mac : a Take Control Crash Course

This ebook was published in May 2015 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. It was written by Jason Snell and edited by Kelly Turner.

This book helps you get started with Apples Photos app, introduced in 2015 to replace iPhoto and Aperture. It focuses on importing libraries from older apps, managing your media inside Photos, and using Photos to edit and share your media with friends, relatives, and the world at large.

Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course, version 1.1

Copyright 2015, The Incomparable Inc. All rights reserved.

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In 2002, Apple introduced iPhoto as a way for us to save our photos on our Macs inside a digital shoebox. At the time, Id owned a digital camera for three months, and had only a few hundred digital images. Over the years, as my photo library grew, Apple revised iPhoto, always trying to stay in front of the onslaught of thousands of digital photos accumulated over a lifetimeat least the lifetime of my two children.

By 2014, enough was more than enough. Apple decided it needed to start from scratch and ditch both iPhoto and the professional-level photo tool it had introduced in 2005, Aperture. It chose to replace them both with a single application, which would be calledin the prosaic style favored by Apple for its iOS appsPhotos.

This book is about Photos for Mac, but the ghosts of iPhoto and Aperture hang over it. Mac users have spent years in those programs, cataloging priceless collections of images and videos accumulated over decades. Photos looks quite different from iPhoto, although its approach resembles its predecessor in many ways. And both are miles awayin both looks and capabilitiesfrom Aperture.

In this book, Ill describe how to perform most of the tasks youll want to do with Photos. No previous knowledge of iPhoto or Aperture is required, though I will walk you through the migration process from both apps and show you where the stuff in those programs ends upif anywherein Photos.

One of the most exciting features of Photos is its embrace of cloud services. For the first time, you can keep your entire photo library in the cloud rather than on your drive. (Its up to you to decide whether you want to embrace the cloud to that degree.) The connection between iOS and the Mac has also never been stronger.

But of course, there are also some changes that wont be as welcome. Some features many people came to rely on in iPhoto and Aperture are gone. I hope some of them will come back one dayafter all, this first version of Photos is just the beginning.

My daughter, born late in 2001, is about to enter high school. Her entire life has been chronicled with digital photostens of thousands of them at this point. I used iPhoto to catalog her childhood. Now that catalog resides in Photos. Photography is how we preserve the images of our lives; its important that we understand the software that allows us to organize, view, and share those images. Thats what this book is for.

The version of the book you have in your hands is an update to the 1.0 version, which was short and meant to be just enough to get you started with Photos for Mac. Now, with version 1.1, Ive written a complete book with the early chapters refreshed with post-beta info and the later chapters added. Thank you to the many 1.0 readers who offered valuable feedback and helped shape this book.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. Lets get started!