Updated: New Photos app is now available for Mac
Update:
The new update is now available on the Mac App Store. Go under Update to begin your download.
As originally written:
According to an Associated Press review of the new Photos app for the Mac, OS X 10.10.3 will be available for download from the Mac App Store on Wednesday, April 8. This latest version of Yosemite has been available to developers and testers since February, and came out in a public beta at the beginning of March.
AP’s Anick Jesdanun gave high praise for Photos, Apple’s replacement for iPhoto and Aperture. Jesdanun said that the auto-fix features of Photos were particularly impressive, and that the Enhance button, which provides a one-step automatic fix for common photo issues, was often all that was needed to make an image perfect. Individual Auto buttons also work quite well, Jesdanun noted, allowing for tweaks to lighting, color, and other elements. Going even further, Photos includes some of the advanced fine-tuning controls found in tools like Adobe Lightroom.
Photos for Mac is very similar to its companion app on the iPhone and iPad. Images get automatically organized, partly from the location information embedded in the pictures. Like its predecessor iPhoto, Photos for Mac utilizes face-detection technology and allows you to group photos by the people in them.
Jesdadun pointed out a feature that I had somehow missed in my own private review of Photos, which is the ability of the program’s crop tool to straighten photos based on the horizon and other features. It takes a few extra steps to make sure your cropped image holds to its original dimensions, but it is still a very nice feature.
Photos stores all of your full resolution pictures on iCloud, with the lower resolution photos kept locally on your Mac to take up less space. Support for camera RAW formats is also included, if you prefer to use those image files.
To get Photos and the rest of the updates in 10.10.3, check the Mac App Store for updates. When you install the update and run Photos for the first time, you will be prompted to turn on iCloud Photo Library and possible purchase more iCloud storage.