OS X 10.10.3, the new Photos app and iCloud
I just installed OS 10.10.3. Download of the 2+ GB upgrade took about 10 seconds. Installation was very quick.
Now I’m upgrading my iPhoto library with 100+ GB of decades of photos to the new Photos app. It’s 64% done as I’m writing this and I wonder what it will be like.
The new Photos feature with iCloud seems very intriguing. They keep all the full res photos in the cloud thus freeing up space on your computer, iPhone and iPad – which retain cached versions and the high res versions are automatically visible on demand.
But… Apple’s iCloud storage costs are crazy high compared with other services these days. For example, Amazon just dropped their unlimited photo storage to $12 a year. Apple is $4/month for 200 GB.
However, if you have less than 5 GB of data it’s free, and 20 GB is just $1/month. Still, compared with Amazon it’s very high.
And then there is OneDrive by Microsoft. 30 GB is free. And if you subscribe to Office 365 it’s only about $70/year and comes with 1 TB of cloud storage plus all the latest Office apps.
I think Apple – never the big price competitor – is going to have to lower their cloud storage prices. Unless enough people with low storage capacity i-devices decide they want to see all their photos everywhere and think the high cloud storage cost is worth it.
Well, as I’m finishing this post Photos has finished migrating my photos and I see a picture of my mother standing at a counter chatting with somebody with the date July 5, 2020. Not a promising first sign…
I’m interested in hearing your thoughts as you delve deeper. For years my photos have been a jumbled mess, and I always intended to organize things in iPhoto. When I heard that Photos was replacing iPhoto, it gave me an excuse to procrastinate even longer. I haven’t installed Photos yet but I got an iPhone 6 this week and it asked me if I wanted to use iCloud Photo Sharing.
There doesn’t seem much to delve into. Superficially it seems to work basically the same as iPhoto. If I was using iCloud to mirror the photo library between devices I could report on that – but I don’t feel like spending $5/month for the iCloud storage size I would need for that. Maybe if Apple lowers its iCloud costs I will give that a try.
Anyway, it seems harmless enough.