[MacTUG] Photos vs iphoto

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

I have been dragging my heels migrating from iPhoto to Photos – because the first few versions had less features than iPhoto. (This is no unusual, Final Cut X had the issue, and Microsoft Edge still has it.)

I have concluded that the High Sierra and later versions are good enough for me to migrate out of iPhoto and thought I would share if anyone cares 😉

Things that Photos can do (generally as well as or maybe better than iPhoto)

  1.  Add geotag (the first few versions of Photos could not let you manually add a geotag)
  2.  Keywords: adding them and editing
  3.  Batch change date
  4.  Searching by keyword, file name etc. May be better than iPhoto
  5.  I can import images automatically into events (now called albums) and I can sort these albums be date etc.
  6.  Speed. It feels as fast or faster than iPhoto
  7.  Visually organize my Albums (called Events in iPhoto).
  8.  People (called Faces in iPhoto) and Places. Seems to work fine. I only use it to help find files to apply keywords to

Things that work in Photos that still may work a wee bit better in iPhoto:

  1.  Edit in external editor: this works, tho I don’t see how you can define the default editor. You can also drag the image from photo onto the dock icon of your editor-of-choice (such as photoshop), as you could in iPhoto. So it generally works, tho iPhoto works a bit better. With iPhoto you can drag a bunch of thumbnails onto the Photoshop icon and they will all open. Then again, Photos has better built in editing so it may be a wash.
  2.  Batch change description. You can do it but you can only create a new description or replace the existing one. With the iPhoto you could add to an existing description which was quite useful
  3.  Batch change title: you can but they all get the same title vs sequential ones in iPhoto. Not that big of deal as I rarely used it.

Features not present

  1.  “Reveal in finder” command is gone. But this is not a deal breaker and may be a good thing as people would get in trouble by mucking with the folder structure in Photos. This is really not an issue for me as I always suggest folks organize their images in a human friendly folder structure and then import them into their “image curating” program. So they have the originals to go back to.

Things Photos has that I don’t really care about:

  1.  Memories, Collections and Moments: these are all ways Photos tries to apply some AI to sorting my files. I don’t use any of them and don’t want to. Before I import I organize into what becomes albums, have good keywords and use Smart Albums. That does all the organizing better than some danged AII 😉

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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-computing/about/people
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