Auld Lang Syne and the Apple Photos We Once Knew

THE YEAR WHEN DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY EVOLVED

Yes. I know. It’s been a month since the ball dropped on 2025. But so much happened last year - big stuff - that I can’t move forward without sharing a look back to a year when photography really changed.

Every year Apple has added a nip and tuck to their Photos experience. It’s like car design in the 70’s. Most years the changes were almost too subtle to notice. Different tail lights. Eight track tape player. More horsepower. Like that. Cosmetic and performance touches that elevate the experience but don’t change the essential tasks.

For most of ten years, that’s been how Apple Photos rolled. Steady, incremental improvements that supported the experience as the industry benchmark for general photo management. Other developers took their cue from Apple with the left hand navigation bar, browse and detail/edit views, non-destructive editing, and virtual Album/Folder hierarchies to organize and navigate.

For everyday photography, that’s been the drill. And for anyone who’s mastered the system you could pretty much go to any other photo application and find your way around. Years. Months. Folders. Albums. Tiny icons with tabs and labels.

The Wild West of the late 2000’s with new software every day, and the gold rush of every electronics company offering a digital camera - each with a unique menu - are a distant memory now. And somewhere along the way digital photography became our every day memory bank, as familiar as reaching for our old iPod. Photography has become second nature and Apple Photos has defined the way we do it.

Photography has become second nature and Apple Photos has defined the way we do it.

But for many months I’ve seen changes afoot in the digital photography universe, and I believe we’ll look back on 2024 as the year that a “new” digital photography came to pass just as LP’s gave way to CD’s which gave way to streaming as the preferred way we consume our music. The photography experience is about to embrace a much larger landscape than we’ve seen before. And Apple Photos is going to be at the center of it all.

THE COLLABORATIVE PHOTO

About 3 years ago, Apple Photos introduced Visual Look Up, where you could identify animals, plants, or landmarks in select photos through an internet query. It was a more advanced application of the object recognition in Photos search, but it introduced a collaborative aspect to our picture collection that stands apart from the home grown photo management we’ve used for years. It might be as simple as identifying a flower or your cat’s breed, but Apple Photos accessed other data to add new context to your photos.

Apple wasn’t the first, of course, but it was on-device in a way that acknowledged the privacy aspect of Apple’s DNA yet leveraged outside resources. A peek behind the curtains, if you will. Along with Machine Learning, Object Recognition, People & Pets, Duplicate Detection, and iCloud Shared Photo Library, a LOT of features morphed from “kind of cool” to “amazing” over the months leading up to 2024. Trust replaced caution, and edgy became normal. With iOS/iPadOS 18 & macOS Sequoia, Apple Photos now offers an Enhanced Visual Search setting - with your permission - to let your devices access an Apple index of global points of interest for identification and (presumably) map locations.

THE DISTRIBUTED PHOTO

But Apple Photos is not for everyone, particularly if you are on a PC or Android device. Yet for years there wasn’t an easy path from iPhone capture to an app with more bells and whistles. Where you could build your own photo network without earning a computer science degree.

Mylio Photos cracked the code and created a photo management system that fills the gap between Apple Photos and professional grade software like Adobe Lightroom and Capture One. Import from Photos is built in, picture distribution and access can be micro-managed across your network of devices, and you can back up everything in multiple places. Just like the big boys.

But it’s the way that Mylio Photos can share your collection, or select parts of it, with family, friends, and colleagues, that really stands out. It’s a clever system. And where Apple Photos taps into object and location resources, Mylio offers more detailed image identification and can connect with the FamilySearch.org database. Perfect for building a connected family legacy photo collection.

After years of development, Mylio Photos has matured into a solid option for photographers who want its unique feature set, advanced sharing options, and a more robust level of photo management than Apple Photos.

THE UNIVERSAL PHOTO

Every app appeals for its own reason and comes with its own limitations as well. Choosing the right application for a particular task or a preferred user experience has long been the photographers’ game. Photo management is not a one-size-fits-all process, and once you commit to an application you like, switching to another one - even if it’s newer, cooler, and more capable - is not an easy decision to make. Migrating your entire photo collection to another app can be a huge task.

Enter Peakto. A super browser of your media that can read and interact with photos and videos housed in multiple applications or in the Finder. You may have pictures in Apple Photos, Lightroom Classic, Folders, Luminar Neo, and others, and they can all show up now - versions included - in a single view. Photos can be searched and grouped in new and exciting ways, then collected across apps and exported into a new Folder if desired, making photos more portable than ever before. You can even search for people and visual content within videos.

Peakto is the Rosetta Stone of photo management.

THE INTELLIGENT PHOTO

Which brings us back to the photo itself.

One of the lessons my mother taught me was to always include my contact information in checked and carryon baggage; a habit she learned from bus, train and steamship travel as a girl. She depended on good samaritans to reroute a mishandled trunk. Today we can add an AirTag and have real time locations with lost item alerts. Our bags are more than an artifact, they can provide proactive intelligence about their status.

Not unlike photos.

Digital photography has always been at the mercy of captured data and the way we handle it. The date an image was taken, file specs, and camera type were often all we had for baseline information. Maybe a location if we’re lucky. But most of the data for context and identification has been added manually after the fact. This is the world of photo management - captions, context, and curation. What turns snapshots into stories.

But like the AirTags, photos have begun to offer proactive intelligence of their own. New image file formats paired with advanced camera technology are starting to create a richer photo experience from the ground up.

A great example of that is Portrait Mode which uses multiple camera lenses and LIDAR distance detection to capture editable focus effects. Then you can change the focus point and depth perception in editing, long after the image was taken. IPhone 15 and 16 now include focus data in ANY image taken where there are subjects at multiple distances.

In February of 2024, Apple released the Vision Pro headset which takes intelligent imaging even farther with Spatial Video and Photo capture and playback, recordable on the iPhone 15 and 16 Pro’s.

The takeaway is that conventional wisdom has favored older established image file formats like TIFF and JPEG because they offer familiarity and a long history of success as reliable image formats. But technology has left them behind. For example, the HEIF file format is capable of recording 4X the color information of a JPEG at a smaller file size. It can also hold multiple versions of an image, voice annotations, depth information and more. A “smart” photo, if you will. For years, HEIF lived mostly on Apple devices and required conversion to JPEG for public sharing. But as of last year, HEIF is now an option on Android, PC’s, and offered on most high-end digital cameras as well. It is still a long way from the universal compatibility of JPEG, but the gap has narrowed as our desire for a richer photo experience has grown.

Good enough is no longer good enough.

PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN

But the foundation of this renaissance is Artificial Intelligence. 2024 saw AI showcased in virtually all aspects of photo and video imaging to enhance, edit, organize, annotate, and curate our pictures. Developers have worked with AI driven tasks like object recognition, machine learning, and background removal for a while, refining the utility and accuracy of these tasks for every day use, but last year it all came together under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence.

Of course, artificial intelligence was the flavor of the year in 2024, so developers can be excused for jumping on the trending bandwagon to promote their products, but it’s also not wrong. AI-assisted photography tasks had been around for months in some form or other, but often with spotty results. Sloppy masking, inaccurate keywords, poor object recognition. But somehow, last year, most of that seemed to go away; the result of better code, faster processing, or 10k hours of experience. Who knows? The stars aligned.

Which brings us back to Apple Photos.

For all the edginess that Apple brings to technology, the company is rarely the first to market with new things. Their innovation is in the way that something works rather than the thing itself. Artificial intelligence is out there, in the wild, so Apple can hardly claim it as their own. But what they can do is offer their own spin on AI all wrapped up in the user friendly experience of Apple’s own ecosystem.

And that’s what they did.

Included in the latest releases of iOS/iPadOS 18 and macOS 15 is what Cupertino calls “Apple Intelligence.” AI tuned to provide you with artificial intelligence that respects the privacy Apple supports, along with device integration. In other words, your iPhone knows where you are and maybe what you’re up to. In the context of Apple Photos that could add more relevant Memories, sharing suggestions, and curated summary albums.

And just so you wouldn’t miss it, they redesigned the whole layout of Apple Photos on the iPhone. The little scamps.

It’s a lot to take in. Back in the day, Smart Albums were the most exotic feature of Apple Photos. They were simpler times.

But last year showcased a lot of changes, and 2025 is rife with possibility. Who’s to say that a little Apple Intelligence won’t actually simplify photo management for those of us with a 100k photos in our Library. And how fun to leverage different ways to view and share out pictures? I’m even starting to record spatial video, even though I don’t own a Vision Pro. Yet.

It is an exciting time to be a photographer. I hope you’ll follow along with me in the coming months. You’ll see a fresh look at the “new” Apple Photos. More detail about the other players in the Apple imaging ecosystem - like Mylio Photos and Peakto. Updates on spatial photos and the acquisition of Pixelmator Pro.

So much stuff.

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If there’s anything YOU are curious about, please reach out and let me know. Whether it’s an old feature you’re struggling with or something new you’ve heard about. We are all photographers now. Come along for the ride and have some fun with it!