PROLOGUE

If you haven't figured this out about me before now, I am a confessed beta tester and early adapter (a.k.a. glutton for punishment and risk taker. As an Aperture user I received an email this AM announcing that Apple is stopping development of Aperture effective with the release of Yosemite 10.10.3 and that it will be replaced by what is essentially a port of the Photos app from iOS 8 and offering a download of the 10.10.3 beta. So once again into the breach…

10.10.3:

I was working on this post when my Mac mini went into a full kernel panic which I have not seen before on this machine. So there are obviously still problems with 10.10.3. Otherwise I have not encountered any noticeable differences from 10.10.2.

PHOTOS
  1. Photos appears to be a pretty straight forward port of the iOS 8 version which is IMO both good and bad. Its primary functional enhancement is a closer integration between the photo library on OS X and iCloud. Apple did not say this, but I suspect iPhoto is on the end of development list as well as Aperture because Photos duplicates most of its functionality.
  2. Like other ports such as Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc some iPhoto and Aperture features got left on the drawing board at least in this beta version.
    1. There is no provision for relocating the library to an alternative location or drive.
    2. Importing images from the iPhoto or Aperture libraries makes a complete physical copy. Photos will not share either the iPhoto or Aperture photo libraries.
    3. Faces and location date generated in Aperture/iPhoto are left behind in the import
  3. There are options to store the entire Photos library on iCloud, duplicate all the images on the computer and iCloud and keep them synchronized, or store thumbnails on the computer and the full images in iCloud.
  4. Image editing is much like iPhoto but not to the level of Aperture
  5. There is no provision for access to an external image editor if the builtin editor is insufficient to the task.
  6. If you delete an image in Photos that deletes the copy in the Photos library and on all your other devices including iCloud and I have not yet found a way to disconnect that.

CONCLUSION

This is probably premature, but if it weren't for the lack of an alternate location for the Photos library, the inability to share/convert the iPhoto/Aperture library, inability to selectively delete images from one location or another, and no easy access to a more powerful external image editor such as Photoshop Elements, Photoshop, or even Graphic Converter Photos would IMO a reasonable replacement for iPhoto but I will definitely miss Aperture's more powerful editing ability. By the way I have a few thousand images and it appears that for Photos to copy all of them to iCloud is going to take many hours (days?) of time.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein