My wife and I both like to take pictures, both with an iPhone and a Nikon DSLR camera. Although I use a PC at work, I use a Mac at home, and there is where I store our almost 40,000 photos. I only sync a portion of those photos to my iPad and iPhone, but I like the idea of making all of my photos available on my iPad and iPhone for those times when I want to see and/or share a photo from years ago. That is one of the features (the iCloud Photo Library) of Apple's replacement for iPhoto, a program called Photos. Apple has a page of its website devoted to the upcoming Photos software, which Apple says is "coming this spring." While iPhoto isn't the only photo-related software I use on my Mac — for example, I also use Photoshop Elements and GraphicConverter — it is the place where I store and perform simple edits on every single one of my pictures so I consider it a pretty big deal for Apple to replace iPhoto with something new. I've been very curious about how Photos will work. A few days ago, Jason Snell (who was the lead editor of Macworld for more than a decade who now runs the great site Six Colors) released a $10 digital book on Photos called Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course. I purchased a copy to check it out.
This is the first time that I have purchased an incomplete book. [UPDATE: Snell tweets that rather than viewing this as an incomplete book, "I prefer to think of this as a pre-order where you get the first half of the book now. But either way..."] Because Photos is not officially out yet, the version of the book that Snell released last week only contains some of the chapters from the final book, chapters that discuss things like how to import an iPhoto library into Photos, the interface of Photos, using albums and smart albums and coping with the lack of Events in iPhoto, etc. But the book does not yet include chapters on using the iCloud Photo Library, editing pictures in Photos, sharing pictures, creating projects, etc. You can buy a copy of the 30 page book now, and then you will be able download the additional approximately 30 pages when Apple releases a final version of Photos and the rest of the book is finished. [UPDATE 5/22/2015: The full book (Version 1.1) was released on May 22, 2015.]
I enjoyed reading this book. Jason Snell is one of the best in the industry when it comes to explaining how to do something on a Mac. He is also incredibly knowledgeable on the subject of working with photos, and fortunately knows how to explain complex concepts clearly. If you want to get a sense of Snell's writing style on this particular subject, he wrote a an article with his initial impressions on Photos for Mac back in February for TidBITS. In addition to the text being informative and entertaining, the layout of this book is excellent (which has been my experience with all of the Take Control series of ebooks). There are tons of pictures and sidebar entries, and when there is a picture associated with something in the text, you see a number in a circle in the text, which corresponds to the picture with the same number in a circle next to it.
My only complaint about this book is that I found myself wanting more — which I suppose was inevitable because this is an incomplete book. The chapters that I am most interested in reading (such as the chapter on the iCloud Photo Library that I can use to make my entire photo album available to my iPhone and iPad, and the new features for editing pictures) are the very chapters that won't be released until the Photos software is final. I hope that the chapter on the iCloud Photo Library includes both Mac and iPhone/iPad tips.
When you purchase this book, you can download it in PDF format (what I used), plus other formats like EPUB and Mobipocket. I read the PDF file in the GoodReader app on my iPad, which worked great.
It was nice to be able to start to read some of this book even before Photos for Mac is released. I look forward to reading the rest of the book to learn more about how to get the most out of the Photos app on my Mac. You can click here to view a free sample of the book, and if you like what you can see, click below to get the book for only $10.
Click here to get Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course ($10.00)
