10/16/19
9:00 am

New Features in the Photos App In macOS Catalina

There are some changes to the Photos app in Catalina, most notably how you browse your photos. Gone are the confusing Years, Collections and Moments views, replaced by the more understandable Years, Months and Days views. You can also see square thumbnails in the All Photos view, plus a few other improvements.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In today's episode let's take a look at what's new in the Photos app in macOS Catalina.
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So with macOS Catalina we get Photos version 5. Now it isn't too different from Photos version 4 that came with macOS Mojave but one of the biggest changes is right there, upfront, for you to see immediately. That's that now things are organized by Years, Months, and Days rather than Years, Collections, and Moments. This is a good thing because Collections and Moments was kind of confusing. What exactly made up a collection. What exactly made up a moment. Months and Days is very clear. 
If you don't see these four options up here click on Photos on the left. If you shrink this window enough you'll have a pull down menu instead of four buttons. Years is pretty straight forward. It groups everything by year. It takes one photo from that year and uses that as the thumbnail. Then you can double click to jump into any year. Now when you do that you'll end up in months. So you can switch between Years and Months either by clicking up here or by being in Years and double clicking on a year to jump into it. 
Now you're in the Months view. Some months will be represented by a single photo. Others by groups of photos. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes even more. The groups are usually broken up in different ways. For instance for this month you can see it's broken up showing three different days that photos were taken. Sometimes these will be date ranges. Sometimes these will be days but different locations inside that day. 
When you double click on one of these you'll jump down to Days. Here it groups everything by day in a big scrolling list and you can see the days as you move by. So, for instance, if we keep moving we see a new day there and we keep moving more we see a new day there. Then it breaks it up  using, kind of, some sort of logic to figure out what the best  photo is, or the most interesting one at least, and then smaller and smaller thumbnails for different photos. It's not going to use all the photos. Just the ones it thinks are representative of what's in there.
You also get these three dots here. You can play a video showing you the photos from that day. Notice it also uses animation to go in and out of these. So, for instance, if I select this photo here and I go to Months you can see how it shrunk that photo into here. Kind of visually allowing me to keep my place to where things are. So to get back to that photo I just double click in there. So I can select a photo, go to Months and you can see it shrink down into that. If I go into Years you could see that year shrink over there. It allows me to visually keep my place as I move between Years, Months, and Days.
Now you still have the All Photos view just like you did before. If you select that you just get this grid list showing you all the photos. You can scroll through it. It's just in chronological order. But we have a new feature now where you can, instead of seeing every bit of all the different photos, giving you some vertical, some horizontal, some landscape ones, you can now go and see them all as square photos. So you click there and now they're all square. It zooms in, more or less, on the center of the photo although it's supposed to use intelligence to figure out if there's a more interesting part of the photo to show.
Then you can scroll through and instead of having a lot of blank space there it could be a lot easier to spot things if they're all the same size square. You also have the ability to shrink or enlarge the size of these. This can go quite small. In this collection here of samples there's only about four or five hundred pictures and this is how small it gets. But in my main library when I shrink it all the way these actually become quite small little thumbnails.
Another new feature is in Memories if you go to a particular memory you'll see a Play button here and you'll be able to play a video here showing a movie of this memory. You've got settings here where you can change the music and also the length of this memory video. This is something we had in iOS before but now it's new to the Mac Photos app.
Another new feature is that in Years, Months, Days, and All Photos if you move the cursor over a live photo or video it automatically starts playing there in the thumbnail. You can turn that off in Photos Preferences. 
Now because machine learning is involved with a lot of the stuff here you may not see some of these features right away. As a matter of fact if you go to Years view and then you scroll all the way to the bottom you'll see a Progress Bar. So it may take a little while for you to see the best photos in the Days and Months view and for some of these other features like Memories to also start appearing.
There are no changes to the Editing tools this time around which is a shame because there's some new things in iOS 13 that I would like to see here like the ability to use filters and light and color changes in videos as well as photos. But perhaps we'll see that in an incremental updating at some point.

Comments: 47 Responses to “New Features in the Photos App In macOS Catalina”

Larry Weissman

5 years ago

Is there any difference in usability if my photos are stored in iCloud? Thanks.

Comments: 47 Responses to “New Features in the Photos App In macOS Catalina”

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