Comment by pi-err | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pi-err | Hacker News Reader

> it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app)

I find Photos.app to be the best Apple app I've ever used. It's simple, modern, works amazingly well between iOS and OS X, transparently manages 100GB of data between iCloud and local storage.

This entire piece is surfing on Mossberg's take and goes way too far.

From what we know, Apple does seem to be sorting out big challenges on software side:

- transition to Swift on 2 platforms, which won't happen until they decide to only support 64-bits OS X and iOS at some point in 2017 or 2018 or later

- OS X and iOS foundations are actually super solid. Accidents happen, both codebases are now much more mature and stable. Probably the best they had for decades

- manage the largest updates in history yearly. You hear of bugs because everybody gets to experience them at the same time. Windows never got that many million devices updated overnight

On top of that, they do seem to have conflicting marketing priorities. They don't know what to do with iTunes - as a brand, as an app, as an experience. They're obviously conflicted whether a user should depend on the AppStore to do stuff (feature creep in Notes.app).

IMO this "apple software sucks" is more a consequence of a stalled marketing than an engineering problem.

I don't see how anyone could call Photos.app the best app they've ever used. Right off the bat, I can never tell you why I'm in a mode where I can multi-select or not. When I double-click on a photo, all of a sudden an intermediate navigation thumbnail bar thing pops up, but it doesn't let me do the things the main thumbnail view does.

I don't know when I can use the back arrow or not.

Flagging no longer shows up on the pictures, so I have to look up to the menu bar to see if a photo is flagged.

I've got a few shared galleries with family. Does anyone know which photos are going to show up in Photos vs Albums (All Photos) vs Shared (Activity and your named shared galleries) and the My Photo Stream under Albums?

Virtually every time I recreate a photo library or get a new device, I need to turn off all the icloud syncing crap and photostream crap about 3 times before it finally starts syncing photos. And sometimes when it does, I click on a photo thumbnail and the wrong photo pops up.

Photos is effing TERRIBLE from a UI/UX, features, and functionality standpoint.

Eh, I think you could say a lot of similar things about iPhoto. That was one shitty app, certainly much, much, much, much more shitty than Photos …

There are always many things “wrong” (in your case it’s mostly your specific use case and the place you are coming from, basically mostly your own preferences and biases?) with something, always, always, it’s impossible to avoid. Can’t design for everyone, just can’t.

PS: Check the menu. It’s absolutely crucial for OS X software. It’s a design paradigm Apple has been unflinchingly following forever, with iPhoto, with Aperture, with everything. They will hide all the custom stuff and little features there that depends on subjective preference there. For example, check View, then Meta Data to get your hearts on the thumbnails.

(Deactivate My Photo Stream. It’s deprecated and Apple will hopefully mothball it soon. I agree, it’s confusing, but that’s the debt you acquire when unthinkingly doing stuff. I agree that sucks, definitely. The All Photos album is also confusing, I agree. Apple should have abolished it and had, but people were whining about it. Basically, the Photos view has all your photos in chronological order, the All Photos album has all of your photos in the order you imported them. Also, don’t you have to explicitly share photos for them to be shared? Which is exactly what you want? I’m not sure what your multi-select point is all about. You obviously cannot multi-select when Photos just shows an overview. I agree that’s a tradeoff, but in my view one that’s very well worth it.)

In summary: Photos is modern, blazingly fast, cruft free and extremely logical. I love it. So much better than iPhoto ever was.

iPhoto was pretty bad, but it seems better than Photos. Perhaps I'm just more used to it. Thanks for the tip about the hearts, but I didn't mean in the title bar of the program, I meant overlaid on the photo itself -- the old flagging method was much easier to see at a glance.

I actually like the photostream. It's an easy way of getting recent phone snapshots onto my computer for exporting or doing whatever I want -- without keeping them around forever.

My multi-select comment refers to this: double-click on a photo in the thumbnails. You're now viewing an enlarged photo. Now there's also a double-row of thumbnails to the left of it. You can use this double-row to navigate, but not to multi-select. You must hit the back arrow to get to the OTHER thumbnail view in order to multi-select. I constantly make this mistake, it's so non-intuitive that you can't multi-select thumbnails to (say) export multiple photos.. not in THIS mode, at least, you now have to hit a back arrow to do the exact same task!

I'm not sure if they've fixed this in Photos, but a big gripe of mine with iPhoto was its "sharing" behavior. If you deleted your photos from your computer, it ALSO deleted them from your 'shared' sites; eg, Facebook or whatever. To me, this was absolutely asinine behavior as many of us use multiple computers, can't store our entire photo libraries on them at all times, and so on. For example, my workflow is to take a lightweight laptop with me when I travel, and the SSD can't hold my whole photo library; just enough to do quick edits, upload, then delete.

I'll have to experiment with Photos' 'sharing' support, but I'm afraid of breaking stuff from past experiences.

You can display hearts on the photos by going to the view menu! (As well as titles if they exist, the file format, …) That info is overlaid!

(I also think it’s entirely reasonable to only have the thumbnail bar for photo navigation. I think the one in iPhoto worked exactly the same? It just maybe wasn’t displayed by default? If you give it all the functionality of all the other views there are consequences to that, knock on effects. For example, which image should be displayed enlarged if you select more than one in the bar? Keeping it simple keeps it simple.)

Ah, I see, if you turn things on in the view menu, it enables it to be overload ONLY in the main thumbnail view mode. When you're viewing a single photo, the heart/title/etc is not overlaid on the full size photo or the nav bar thumbnail.

There are more pc's running windows 10 than there are macs in operation, so microsoft definitely does updates at the scale of os x and beyond.

Personally, i don't feel that apple's software quality is getting worse, but then it has always been a mixed bag for me. I found the apple quality halo to be a bit of a myth across the half dozen apple devices i own. Seems comparable to windows' quality.

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