Work with your Photos

More imaginative image curation

The Photos app in macOS 10.15 has a new look that avoids the traditional flip between scrolling through all your photos and viewing just one, presenting a more imaginative tiled layout to curate shots organised by various criteria.

The sheer number of pics we’re amassing these days can feel unmanageable, particularly on the Mac, where you’ll probably consolidate your collection from multiple sources. Photos will be able to show ‘only the best shots’, courtesy of the machine learning technology that Apple is continuously refining. This will also enable Photos to assemble snaps belonging to moments like anniversaries and holidays. Photos also promises to avoid cluttering your view with duplicates.

Exploring edits

In iOS 13, the Photos app not only shares the Mac’s smarter viewing options but gains new editing tools for both still and moving images – including the ability to apply filters and effects to videos, and rotate them in fine increments to fix wonky camera angles. This is a very processor-intensive job, so it’ll be interesting to see how fast it works.

Tweaks to the filter interface make adjustments more controllable, and new Portrait Lighting effects let you change the lighting of Portrait Mode shots after taking them, simulating how light strikes faces rather than just brightening or darkening pixels. A High-Key Mono effect creates flattering portraits with dodged skin tones and burned shadows.

The Photos app looks great in the new Dark Mode (see right). It’s not just here, though, that photography gets smarter: iOS 13 also enables multi-camera capture. With a 2018 iPhone or an iPad Pro, you can record simultaneous streams from two or more cameras, front and rear. Support for multi-cam recording hasn’t been announced in the default Camera app, but it’s there for developers to exploit.

iOS 13’s Photos app gains filters and effects for video