5 Features I wish Apple would add to Photos on the Mac
Up till now I haven't really used Photos on the mac except for managing my iPhone images. While I do like the background syncing with my mobile devices, I don't find that it really meets my needs as a photographic management tool. As someone who used Aperture for a long time, I wish Apple had made the software a little more advanced. Having used it a little more recently on my trip to London and Brussels, I realised that there a few features or changes, that could be added, that aren't huge, but I think would really improve the experience, especially for more seasoned photographers.
So, in no particular order here are 5 features (or changes) that I wish Apple would add to Photos. (I'm sending this to Apple's feedback team too). I realise that there are lots more features that people would like to see in Photos, and so would I, but I think we need to be realistic too. As it's a free application, I don't think Photos will ever have the same feature set of Aperture, but within the confines of what it is, there are still lots of things that can be improved.
- Improve Raw +Jpeg handling. At the moment, Photos supports Raw + Jpeg pairs, but it always defaults to JPEG. What's more, in order to change from Jpeg to RAW you have to go into the edit mode in order to make the change. What I would rally like to see, is the ability to select Raw or Jpeg as the primary format when importing, and the ability to batch change existing pairs. Basically, mimic the behaviour from Aperture.
- Add watermarking to exporting. At the moment, if you export images from Photos there's no way to watermark the images without having to use an additional app. It would be really great if Apple would add the ability to add a text or graphic watermark when exporting the image, as this is a pretty important feature for a lot of users.
- Improve drag and drop support. Currently, the ability to drag and drop images from Photos to other applications is very limited. Some applications don't work at all, and others behave strangely. It seems that when you drag and drop Photos implements an export and it really only works properly to the finder. I would love to see this fixed as it's a real a pain.
- Allow other applications to write directly into the Photos library. One of the great things about the photo library on iOS is the way it acts as a repository for all image on iOS and can be accessed from most apps on the platform. I think when photos on the mac was first announced people had hoped this is what it would be like, but it's not currently set up that way. whether Apple was to add this as an API or some other mechanism, it doesn't really matter, but they should make it easy for developers to add images directly into the Library.
- External Editor. This is probably one of the most sought after features, and I'm really surprised that this hasn't been added by now. I know they've added the ability for image editing extensions, but we really need the capability to send an image to an external editor and re-import the saved version back in to Photos. At the moment the only real way to do this is to export from Photos first, as you can't even drag and drop into apps like Photoshop for example (see point 3).
That's it for now. As I said earlier, there's lots more features I wish they would add, and there are lots of things I'm sure previous Aperture users wish they would add, but I think within the confines of the App as it is, I think these modest improvements would help a great deal. What do you think? What would you like to see that you think might be a reasonable change?
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