STOP **** UK MAC User ALERT ****

iPhoto No More, the end of iPhoto by the usurper Photos

BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE UPGRADING TO Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3

Apple’s latest update to Yosemite has arrived in the UK and to start the new tax year off Apple is demanding monies to store your precious photos, videos, slo-mo and timelapse as highest quality originals only in the [i]cloud. It really does make a lot of sense to do this and takes us even closer to the ultimate ‘dumb terminal’ that Larry Ellison predicted back in the 90s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer

A word of caution, upgrading to 10.10.3 will replace the iPhoto icon in your Mac’s dock with the new Photos icon. If you go ahead and open the new Photos app from the dock and follow the prompts you’ll see it looks just like your iPhone or iPad photos and not at all like it used to. Fear not, your iPhoto library and all your pictures are still on your computer and the iPhoto app is still there in the Applications folder. You can carry on using iPhoto and ignore the Photos app but will be stuck in the pre-2015 digital photo storage era, which is fine for now.

If you have just a few photos, say 100 taken with your iPhone or iPad, then the upgrade will be fairly painless and take an hour or so. You’ll be able to store all your photos in the cloud and access them from all your Apple devices and anyone else’s for that matter, all for free. Free until you fill up your allocated storage. The new Photos app is a boosted iOS version, really easy to use and encourages you to enter more information about each photo by making it simple and quick to do so. 

If you have fifty gigabytes or more of photos stored in your existing iPhoto Library then you will be in for a long wait during the upgrade and will be expected to pay to store your entire photo library on Apple’s solar powered servers. Apple sold you the computer, now you have to pay to use it.

This is actually quite a good idea when you think about it; iCloud will automatically compress the pictures stored on your computer so that they take up less space on your internal hard drive, your fifty gigabyte iPhoto library becomes just five gigabytes or storage on your computer’s hard drive. If you need the uncompressed original photo then your computer automatically downloads it from iCloud (internet connection required).

That’s a really smart use of the internet; your personal digital picture library stored as originals safely delivered on demand, backed up, catalogued and indexed, tagged and geo-located, permanently secured and protected by an eight character password that only you know. The new Photos app is a similar concept to iTunes Match, where all your music is stored in the cloud and delivered on demand if you own the rights to listen to it. Photos on the other hand are exclusively owned by you, you don’t grant Apple the right to view or share your photos stored in iCloud. So your photos are private unless your eight character password for your AppleID is forgotten or discovered or the sun stops shining for a moment. If you can afford the monthly fees for extra iCloud storage and are lucky enough to have broadband speeds of at least 10Mbps download and 2 or 3Mbps upload, then welcome to your new digital photo library. Anything slower then stick with iPhoto, don’t use Photos but DO upgrade to 10.10.3 which fixes recent WiFi issues and has some other improvements.

How to keep your photos after accidentally updating to MacOS X Yosemite 10.10.3

It’s OK, iPhoto and all your duplicates, memories and creativity are all still there on your internal or external drive and the iPhoto app will still work. It will just be a little more difficult to synchronise with your other devices. You can use both apps at the same time, choose the ones you want to keep on all your devices and only put those in the Photos app. Edits and additions you make in iPhoto will not appear in Photos, and vice versa.

TOP TIP #1

Take some time to go through your photos and decide which ones could be stored elsewhere. Whilst you may want to keep your favourite pictures of your children, holiday, wedding, etc on all your devices you should take ownership and responsibly share (ie. store on iCloud and sync with your devices) those which you consider appropriate or wholly necessary to be available on all your devices. Garbage In, Garbage Out, as we used to say in computing in the eighties. Perhaps you could store just a few of your wedding photos in iCloud and keep the rest on a backup drive elsewhere.

TOP TIP #2

BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER AFTER UPGRADING TO Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3

TOP TIP #3

Call Fromester if you need some help.