Apple seeds OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite beta with tweaked Photos app

Downloading the public beta right now. My Mac's snappier even though the update isn't even installed yet. Wow.

The Photos app has been getting somewhat better with each beta release but I think it's going to be a hugely disruptive release when it hits general availability. Unless you have a very high speed broadband connection it takes weeks to upload a large photo collection. I have about 26,000 photos and they're still not all in the cloud. I have a 200 GB iCloud disk and the photos will consume about 60 GB when or if it eventually finishes. The slowness is one thing but the aggressiveness of the upload is quite another thing. It will consume as much bandwidth as possible which makes doing anything else on your connection a real challenge. I pretty much have to turn it off whenever I want to use my connection for anything else. Yeah, I'm limited by location to only 6Mbps DSL so my case may be on the fringes of what others experience, I.e., large data and a small pipe. In any case, I still expect Apple to see a flood of complaints once this thing hits the streets and millions more people start experiencing the behaviors that I've been seeing since I first installed the beta on my machine. The other thing I can't figure out is how to connect more than one computer to the same Photos collection. I can connect all of my iDevices to my photo collection, which is very cool because it only keeps thumbnails of the photos on the devices which means even 15,000 photos takes very little storage on the device. But when I try to attach a second OS X device running 10.3 to the same collection it won't even let me turn on the feature so my only access to my photos on other OS X machines is via the iCloud web client. I'm still thinking this thing is far from what Apple would consider release quality for the average consumer who expects it to "just work." Welcome to the reality of (semi) "big data" models in a world of limited connectivity like we have in the U.S. This type of application is going to expose just how pathetic many internet service providers are in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world. We've been sold a toy connectivity solution at a high price. The Photos app will start to expose the frayed edges of the rest of the solution. It won't be pretty.

[quote name="DewMe" url="/t/185480/apple-seeds-os-x-10-10-3-yosemite-beta-with-tweaked-photos-app#post_2701098"] The other thing I can't figure out is how to connect more than one computer to the same Photos collection. I can connect all of my iDevices to my photo collection, which is very cool because it only keeps thumbnails of the photos on the devices which means even 15,000 photos takes very little storage on the device. But when I try to attach a second OS X device running 10.3 to the same collection it won't even let me turn on the feature so my only access to my photos on other OS X machines is via the iCloud web client. [/quote] How exactly do you expect two Macs share the same Library other than what is on the cloud? Are you Macs logged in using the same Apple ID? I have several all able to see the same cloud data but obviously not each other's Libraries.

[quote name="Slurpy" url="/t/185480/apple-seeds-os-x-10-10-3-yosemite-beta-with-tweaked-photos-app#post_2701119"] Yup. The photos app is fantastic, as is the iCloud photo library concept, but unfortunately uploads speeds will make the initial experience painful. For most people with decent sized photo libraries, the initial upload will take days, if not weeks. Worse, progress is pretty opaque. Connection speeds are definitely the weakest component of any ambitious cloud services going forward. So yes, I expect a lot of pain. I meticulously culled by photo library before turning it on from my Mac, got down to 6,000 photos, made sure the Mac stayed awake, kept the photo app open, yet after several days it was only 1/2 finished. There is no ETA. The average user will blindly turn this on, and won't realize how much time will actually be needed before the process is complete and the benefits are available. Also, I can see this absolutely destroying Apple's datacenter bandwidth. Hopefully they are ready for hundreds of millions of iOS/OSX owners simultaneously uploading thousands of terabytes of data.  [/quote] It is interesting that most of the comments so far have been about the new photos app. Frankly I'm not surprised. Apples view of the net certainly doesn't reflect my reality, as such I have little faith in cloud based services replacing local storage. Backups maybe, file resources for friends and the like certainly but the cloud is no place to store vast quantities of data like is represented by most photo collections. Even if the bandwidth is there the reliability isn't. As for the photos app the only thing Apple can do is to suggest that people find high speed connections to the net. Frankly that isn't easy either.