Do more with Photos

The Mac’s built-in photo library and picture editor is still quite young, but it has come a long way in just over a year. Alan Stonebridge shows you how to make the most of it on your Mac.

When an established app is replaced by a ground-up rewrite, disruption is pretty much inevitable. That’s true even of something seemingly innocuous like software that organises and edits your photos.

Though Photos was a capable app in its initial form, it lacked some important features that were present in its predecessor. Apple has since remedied several key criticisms, even going so far as to allow developers to augment the app with new editing tools, but even now the workings of features such as iCloud Photo Library can seem obtuse. Make a small change to one of Photos’ preferences and suddenly things no longer work as you expect.

We’ve distilled the essential info about the app and its connections to iCloud to help you get to understand the capabilities and the foibles of the latest version, which is bundled with OS X El Capitan. If you’ve avoided migrating from iPhoto or Aperture to their replacement, now’s a good time to reconsider your decision. And if you’re bewildered by the differences between iCloud Photo Library and My Photo Stream, we explain why you may actually want to use both of them.