Roger Fingas
Apple on Thursday began alerting Photos users on the Mac that it will stop taking orders for its Photo Print Products service after Sept. 30 this year.
macOS 10.13.6 users working in Photos are seeing a pop-up about the deadline, which also includes a recommendation that people download a third-party app with a Photos Projects extension. This lets developers build a photo printing interface within Photos, though the actual payment and printing is outside of Apple's hands.
Photo Prints Products has been around since 2002, when it was a part of iPhoto. By the time it reached full scale people were able to order albums, books, and calendars, as well as individual prints.
The company has never carried the service over to iOS however, and it appears to be completely absent in betas of macOS Mojave. That OS is due to launch sometime in the fall, and indeed the Sept. 30 deadline may suggest that Mojave will ship sometime in September, which would be in keeping with past macOS rollouts. High Sierra, for instance, went live on Sept. 25 last year.
The service has likely dwindled in importance as Apple's customer base has become increasingly iPhone- and iPad-centric. The demand for physical photos has shrunk too, with many people only caring about having digital copies they can message or post on social networks.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
26 Comments
How sad. Like the Apple’s old Cards app for iOS, the print orders through Photos were beautifully done. Will need to place an order for 2019 calendars earlier this year.
That sucks. It was an amazing service.
...like iWeb I really liked the integration of iPhoto project books to in house media and have ordered a number of them for clients, friends and myself... Reliable, high quality and fast. To me all of this seemed heading in an extension of Appleworks which I also used extensively at the time. With the demise of server, is the ecosystem approach being increasingly abandoned and outsourced, like so much of the hardware such as monitors and now Time Capsule...? Is this more of a 'free trade' approach to computing...? Will iMovie be next in favour of YouTube? All ears on any recommendations for 3rd party apps, ideally with import capabilities, and privacy considerations (non-loud based) with many thanks...
Am I reading this right that Calendars will soon not be a part of Photos?
We've made a family calendar every year since our 12 year old was born. We order a dozen or so for different family members.
Of course the calendars are pix of the kids, but also family events.
We didn't realize it at the time, but they're GREAT family heirlooms to review. Grab "2012" and flip through it, and be nostalgic.
I wonder if the extensions would provide less functionality, different functionality, or more functionality.
I'm going to sound like a hater, and I apologize in advance, AND I blame myself for not being able to keep my mind current & flexible:
1) I *loved* iMovie HD, and made about 50 kid-movies over the years on a iBook G4. Intuitive, and the app disappeared and it was all my creativity The redo to iMovie 08 to make it easier was so hard and counter-intuitive I never made another movie again. And of course I can't burn DVDs anyway. [I know there's Internet-only methods that are probably "better". Haven't been able to get my mind there.]
2) I loved iPhoto, heard that Photos could be opted out when the O/S was updated, but got Photos anyway. Really don't like the interface for our 55,000 pix, and now our biggest family product, the Calendar, will be gone?
I know it's a mobile world, but us (mental-)Dionsaurs are REALLY getting left behind. (Cue the SJ quotes about death being a good part of life to move on. I'm really living it).
E.
That is funny, I just placed an order with iPhoto, not the Photo app and I did not get this warning. I am going to hate to see this go, I know you can do things on shutterfly and similar but their quality was not as good as apple servers. I wonder if Apple is just getting out the middle of this since I would image people are not printing photo as much. If they just getting out of the middle and the same companies they were using will be offering the same quality and service through the new extension that will be fine.