What The Heck Is Apple Photos?
It is the best of names. It is the worst of names.
If you ask people what they use to manage pictures on their iPhone, they probably won't say “Apple Photos.” Same for their Mac. Or iCloud for that matter. And it doesn’t help that the name of what it is is the same as what it does.
Hey there, do you put your photos in Photos?
Taking the cue from that, Google has its own Photos app as does Amazon. Then there’s Affinity Photo which is more for a professional photo app but, well, it just adds to the confusion.
So for the record, Photos is what you use on iOS - iPhone, iPad, iPod - and on the Mac that comes with the device. It also runs on iCloud.comwhere it’s also sometimes called iCloud Photos for some reason, but its really just the same app on a different platform.
And Photos is different from the old iPhoto, even though many people use the names interchangeably. They aren’t.
So here’s the thing that matters. Apple Photos is a system. It’s own ecosystem, really, and that’s what make it so useful. When you take a picture on the iPhone, it gets synced up to iCloud and shared out to all the other iPhones, iPads, Macs, AppleTV’s, Apple Watches and even iPods if anyone still has one.
What that means is that once you know how to use Photos on your iPhone, you also know most of what you need to use it on your Mac. Or iPad. You can even start organizing or editing on one device and finish it up on another.
There are really just 2 rules to live by with Apple Photos:
Sync up all your devices to iCloud to get your pictures everywhere
Everything everywhere really does mean everything everywhere - if you delete from one device that photo goes away on iCloud and all the other devices as well.
