In June 2014, Apple announced its plan to discontinue the applications iPhoto and Aperture, to be replaced by a new application, Photos, at some point in 2015. Photos is included with OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, released as a free update to users on April 8, 2015. On September 13, 2016, the app was later included in tvOS 10.
Features
Photos is intended to be less complex than its professional predecessor, Aperture. Photos are organized by the "moment", which is a combination of time and location metadata attached to the photo.
Editing
Photos tucks complex editing tools into several simple controls by default. Photos is designed to "reward curiosity and additional clicks with ever more granular manipulation capabilities". A one-click auto-enhance button is also available.
Photo Library is heavily integrated into the program, keeping photos and videos in sync with various Apple devices designated by the user, including edits and album structures. Storage starts at a complimentary 5 GB and can be bought in a number of tiers up to 2 TB. While iCloud integration is still optional, it is much more central to Photos as compared to iPhoto.
Like its predecessors, Photos initially included a number of options for professional printing of photos, which could then optionally be turned into books or calendars and mailed to an address. With Photos, Apple added new types of prints, including square sizes and the ability to print panoramas. In July 2018, Apple announced, via a pop-up message in Photos, that they would be discontinuing these services, adding that users should submit any final orders by September 30, 2018.
Sharing
iCloud Photo Sharing allows sharing photos with others. Others can view, like or comment existing shared photos or contribute new photos to the shared album. Other ways of sharing includes e-mail, social platform that integrates through iOS Extensions, or Apple's peer-to-peer AirDrop technology.
Criticism
Critics have noted the loss of functionality in Photos as compared to its predecessors. In particular, photos can no longer be ordered as events but are either automatically ordered chronologically into moments or must be put into albums; the latter do not allow for automatic sorting. As of OS X El Capitan, only the latest version of iPhoto still operates; because iPhoto has been removed from the Mac App Store, customers who upgraded to El Capitan without first obtaining the latest version of iPhoto were locked out of iPhoto without warning, pushing them to use Photos.
