Photos for OS X ⇥ macworld.com

Macworld’s Christopher Breen got a sneak peek at Apple’s new Photos app for the Mac, and it sounds pretty great:

I’ve had very little time with Photos but my general impression is that it hits a sweet spot for the casual-to-enthusiastic iOS and digital camera shooter. Its navigation is more nimble and, from what I can tell, its performance is significantly improved over iPhoto’s, which I found sluggish with large image libraries. And, scaling back to the big picture, it’s the first of the old iLife apps that shares a common experience among the Mac, iOS devices, and iCloud. All your photos, your most recent edits, wherever you are.

Lots of new details. Photos does, indeed, support both RAW and JPG files, and it doesn’t look entirely like a scaled-up version of the iOS app. It even includes printed products, contrary to the word I received that they might be removed. I’m happy to be wrong here.

Apple’s spotty record with cloud services is worrying, though. I feel comfortable with syncing my calendars and contacts with iCloud, but I’m not sure if I can entrust my most precious memories to the company. I should be able to — my local backup solution is nothing compared to Apple’s server farms — but I worry about whether all my photos will be there when I need them to be. Federico Viticci has put his whole photo library in iCloud, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet, especially considering the spotty record I’ve had trying to set up iCloud Photo Library.¹

See also: Apple’s promo page for Photos. The adjustment options are few, but powerful. I do hope VSCO releases their film stock imitation processes as a Photos extension; I get a lot of use out of the Aperture plugins.