Photos

Clever tech and artistic features are a click away

Photos becomes more useful for the most common tasks of searching and displaying

Apple says it brought the new Memories feature to macOS to turn your shots into unforgettable

experiences. Well, it’s a little overdue. Photos on the Mac has been a little underwhelming to date. Most of us use it, but we hardly ever think it’s the complete experience it should be. Photos in Sierra at least takes two steps towards making us feel like it’s more like the app you may have expected to get in the first place.

Photos becomes more useful for the most common tasks of searching and displaying your pictures in creative ways. With its ‘machine learning’ tech, not only does Photos have better face recognition – remember how hit and miss it used to be? – but it can also identify places and pets! What that boils down to is a much improved way to search your ever-expanding library.

We take a lot of shots on iPhone, each containing lots of information. Photos in Sierra puts that data to much better use to automatically group your shots from a certain location or with particular subjects in Albums.

Then there’s Memories, a way for the app to assemble related images in short movies. You pick a style, choose some music, and then let an algorithm go to work on making a slideshow with no effort from your side.