Why I hate Apple Photos

 The Apple Photos is a very basic photo management program that comes with Apple devices since 2014, intended initially to run on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

It's simple, fast and indeed good in organizing images captured with a mobile telephone. Today (2024) it has some basic image edition/correction features that may cover 90% of basic users' needs on this matter.

The main problem is that Apple pushed it down the throat of Mac users, after the dreaded decision to kill the fantastic Aperture, a full featured, professional-level DAM and editor. Aperture was not perfect but it was close to this.

Some things I really HATE on Photos:

1 - Data Loss

It forces you to use iCloud, which can be extremely dangerous, and I'm not talking about privacy or security issues, but unintentional data loss.

The default modus operandi of iCloud is set to send your photos to the iCloud drive AND synchronize them between your Apple devices. This is made by design and intended to help phone users to manage their photo collection easily 

This feature looks cool for most users, but this easiness comes with a very dark side under the rug.

You must know that when you delete an image, let's say, from your Mac's Photos, this same image will also be deleted from all devices.

Disabling the Photos synchronization to iCloud is the only way to prevent this.

It's wise to keep a backup copy of your Photos library in a safe place just to have a way to revert any data loss.

2 - Bad Keywords and Terrible Search engine

Photos has a very basic keywords tagging. It works but it's far from ideal and its use is clumsy. The search engine is not remotely close to what Aperture offered, for example, you can't search based on metadata unless you use a primitive and tedious workaround of using smart albums, for example, to create one named "Photos taken with Camera XXX"... 

In short, Photos is FAR from a serious DAM and it can be dangerous to your photo archive if you don't take the proper measures.

Aperture (RIP) was centered on efficiency and data security, Photos is more like a tin toy that can cut your finger...