The Photos app for Apple Vision Pro offers a robust and multifaceted platform for managing, editing, and sharing your photos and videos. Developed by Apple, this program is designed to seamlessly integrate with other Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even Apple Watch, ensuring that your precious moments are always at your fingertips. This review explores the various features of the app, highlights user experiences, and delves into areas that need improvement.
The browsing functionality within Photos is nothing short of intuitive and interactive. The All Photos grid view allows users to see their entire photo and video library displayed in an interactive, zoomable grid. This feature is further refined by options to view media by Months and Years, making it easy to navigate through different time periods. For those looking for specific content, Photos offers robust filtering options that allow users to quickly narrow down their view to edited photos or exclude screenshots, providing a highly customizable browsing experience.
Browsing by collections enhances this experience significantly. The app organizes your library into various categories such as Recent Days, People & Pets, Trips, Memories, custom albums, and even Wallpaper Suggestions. This categorization extends to Media Types, segregating photos into subsets like Selfies, Videos, Portraits, and Screenshots. Utilities further segment your media into useful topics like Duplicates, Documents, Receipts, and Handwriting. Users can also pin their most frequently accessed collections for quick access, an immensely convenient feature for those who want certain collections at their fingertips.
Customization is a strong suit of the Photos app. Users can reorder the Collections sections to suit their personal preferences and add items to Pinned Collections for easy access to frequently used content. This level of customization ensures that the app can adapt to a wide array of user needs, making it as personal as it is powerful.
Search capabilities in Photos are enhanced by on-device machine learning. This allows the app to analyze your photos, making it possible to search for specific people, places, dates, events, and even objects and scenes like basketball, birthday cake, or beach. This intelligent search functionality is a game-changer, drastically reducing the time it takes to find a particular photo among thousands.
Organizing photos into albums is simple yet effective. Users can create albums for their favorite topics, ensuring that related photos are grouped together. This feature complements the app’s robust browsing capabilities and adds another layer of organization.
The Memories feature leverages on-device intelligence to create curated video presentations of trips, holidays, people, and pets, all complete with music pacing. For Apple Music subscribers, the app even suggests suitable songs, adding an extra layer of customization to the experience. These memory movies offer a delightful way to relive cherished moments.
For those keen on photo editing, the app doesn’t disappoint. It offers a range of sophisticated yet easy-to-use tools such as auto-enhance, highlights, shadows, vibrance, and definition. Users can apply these edits to individual photos or batches, adjusting keyframes in Live Photos and adding fun effects. High frame rate videos can be slowed down for cinematic, slow-motion effects, making this a versatile tool for both casual and serious photographers.
Sharing capabilities are robust and multi-faceted. Users can share photos directly through Messages, Mail, and third-party apps. The iCloud Shared Photo Library allows seamless sharing with up to five family members. Shared Albums enable selective sharing, and iCloud Links allow users to send sets of photos and videos via link, viewable on any platform and browser. This array of sharing options ensures that your photos can reach their intended audience, regardless of the medium.
iCloud integration further enhances the utility of the Photos app. By storing your photos and videos in iCloud, you can access them from any device at any time. This includes iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Vision Pro, iCloud.com, and even PCs. This seamless access ensures that your media is always available, no matter where you are.
Privacy is a top priority in the Photos app. The app uses on-device intelligence to analyze your media, ensuring that face recognition, scene detection, and object detection are all conducted securely. The Hidden and Recently Deleted albums are locked by default, providing an extra layer of security for sensitive content.
The Photos app even extends to the Apple Watch, allowing users to view and manage Memories, Featured Photos, or an album directly from their wrist. Creating a Photos or Portrait watch face adds another layer of personalization.
Despite these comprehensive features, user reviews highlight several areas needing improvement. One user pointed out the inefficiency of the current “Adjust” settings, suggesting a saved profile for quick application to multiple photos. Another user detailed issues with the People identification algorithm, expressing frustration over its inconsistency and poor performance. The app’s widget also received criticism for its limited functionality and poor memory curation.
Transitioning from Google Photos to Apple Photos remains a thorny issue for some users. They report difficulty in migrating photos from Google’s ecosystem to Apple’s, compounded by Apple’s restrictive “walled garden” approach. This lack of seamless integration with other services hampers the user experience for those accustomed to alternatives like Google Photos.
Other reviews point out unnecessary complexity in basic tasks, such as deleting or recovering photos, and the lack of meaningful updates for organizational features. Markup functions have also deteriorated over time, with users struggling with shape orientation and text addition.
the Photos app for Apple Vision Pro offers an extensive suite of features that cater to a broad spectrum of user needs, from casual browsing and sharing to advanced editing and album organization. While the app excels in many areas, there are notable gaps that need addressing to provide a more seamless and efficient user experience. Apple has built a strong foundation with the Photos app, but there’s room for improvement, especially in terms of user feedback responsiveness and cross-platform integration.
