Apple’s new Photos may be much better than I first thought. Since killing Aperture and iPhoto last Friday, there has been a tremendous amount of discussion about what the future holds for serious photographers using Apple products. I must admit that I was right there with the naysayers about how disappointed I was with Apple discontinuing my favored Digital Asset Management (DAM) program known as Aperture. However, what a difference a week can make. I’m now thinking that as always, Apple may be on to something.
The new face of Apple’s Photo program.
Without getting into a lot of details, here’s a link for those who want more, Apple had three different pieces of photo software that all worked and ran differently across their two different operating systems, Mac OSX and iOS. The difficulty of trying to develop and provide updates for three different photo editing programs must be at least part of the reason we saw so few updates for Aperture. To solve this time-consuming problem, Apple is planning to consolidate all aspects of photo editing into one program, built directly into the Mac and iOS operating systems. Additionally, Apple is providing developers unheard access to this new Photo program via PhotoKit and App Extensions architecture. This gives third party developers, what we typically call plugins such as the NIK collection, the ability to write programs that work seamlessly, inside of Photos and do it in a nondestructive way. Not only does this simplify software development for Apple, but it opens the door for endless opportunities for third party developers to provide tools that drop directly into Photos and look and work as if they are actually a part of the new program. No more going out to a third party application/plugin. This new way of thinking about software embraces the world of developers to create programs for Apple that look and feel like it was produced under the Apple umbrella. Apple saves development costs and developers outside of Apple get to use their creativity and passion to build products that work directly within Photos. This sounds like it could be a much better way of going forward and if that turns out to be true, I wouldn’t be surprised because that’s what Apple is known for. Giving us something we didn’t’ even know we want. Time will tell and I’m excited to see where this goes.