Review of Apple Photos: the good, the bad and the ugly

31 Dec 2018

In my recent posts I explained why I’m moving to Apple Photos and how I did it.

Here’s the long-awaited conclusion of that journey, where I tell you how I like this new photo-organizing solution!

The good 👍

• I noticed I have more fun with my photos: instead of the chore of organizing them, I look at my photos, share them with friends and family and make fun edits of them
• Apple Photos has lots of editing options built in (look at these extensive editing options!) and integrates with plugins and filters
• edits are synced with my iPad and other devices. There are loads of (free!) apps to edit photos on mobile devices, such as PhotoFox, Snapseed and Adobe’s suite. I make some global changes on my desktop within Apple Photos and remove glare with Affinity Photo, switch to my iPad for finishing touches and share the finished photo with WhatsApp on my iPhone. OMG: this is the life
• iCloud is cheaper than dropbox
• I get cool reminders from Apple like ‘this day 5 years ago’ or ‘all birthdays of '

Here’s an example of a photo I edited solely with Apple Photos: original, apple-photos auto-improve, improved by hand - and for comparison the google-photos auto-improve.

The bad 🤔

• it crashed multiple times. Over the course of a couple of weeks I would say around 5 times
• I don’t fully understand the structure of the app. Apple automagically creates ‘moments’ that can’t be renamed, and these ‘moments’ are grouped into ‘sets’, which are incomprehensible. Even worse is when clicking on a photo in a ‘set’, it does not go to this photo, but instead to a random ‘moment’ close to the date of the photo you wanted to see. Good luck finding that one photo back!
• there’s no syncing of ‘persons’: face recognition done on the laptop stays on the laptop. Supposedly this is for privacy purposes, but I think it’s just lame
• bad geotag-grouping: photos taken inside my house are all scattered in a 50 meter radius around my house. No, the photo of me holding my cat was not taken at my neighbors house. Why not offer clustering to group things neatly together?
• WhatsApp photos get geo-tagged to the location you received them, which doesn’t make sense
• slow syncing: it can take minutes to sync
• it’s not possible to separate work-photos from others. It used to be possible to ‘hide’ photos and only have them show up in certain albums, but Apple changed that behavior
• sharing with non-icloud users is a hassle…

The Ugly 🤮

• it’s slow on my laptop 🐌. Perhaps because of an external disk? Or an old MacBook Pro (mid-2012)? Or because of the 87.000 files? But there are really no excuses. Changing to edit mode should not take 20 seconds. Clicking on ‘persons’ should not take 16 seconds. Waiting 2 minutes between clicking on a ‘person’ and seeing their photos pop-up is just inexcusable
• unsupported movie formats get shown as photos on iPad and iPhone as a screenshot of first frame. On my laptop they show as videos. This is hugely confusing! What conflates the matter more is that because of this, the numbers are different on different devices (2.237 videos on laptop, 2.015 on iPhone). Why not convert the movies to a phone-playable format during the upload??
• according to the internet, it’s not possible to move a local iCloud database: it needs to completely sync it again, taking days
• movies are imported with the wrong date: Apple Photos uses the date of import instead of date of creation

Conclusion

All in all, Apple Photos needs more love from Apple. I would still recommend it, but I think for most people Google Photos would be the better option (if you don’t edit your photos as much and trust Google with your privacy).