Apple’s Photos App – Better with Extensions

Better and Easier

Having moved on from Aperture to the Apple Photos application I’m pleased to see that it is getting better and even easier to use. There were improvements to the application when El Capitan arrived and now it is improving further with extensions. It is all so nicely integrated into the application it makes it easy to use features from other applications right from within Photos. A couple of my favourite applications from the people at Macphun were already upgraded and provided extensions. I had thought that Intensify Pro should also have an extension, but there wasn’t one there yet. So I opened up the application this morning and told it to check for updates. Lo and behold, there was an update available to the latest Creative Kit version. So I did the install and then the third party extension only needed a check mark in the box in the system preferences. I use Photos a lot because I take a lot of photos and also because I work with them in applications like iColorama – Image Editor and Brushes Painter – Katerina Alieksieienko and Procreate on my iPad. All of my photos and photo art end up in the photos app.

More updates to Photos application

I already had extensions for Noiseless, Tonality, Snapheal, BeFunky. I was surprised to see that Pixelmator had added an extension I hadn’t noticed. This morning had a play with the Distort functions added by Pixelmator and I was pleased with it. Changes made to a photo are applied and you can go back to the original at any time from within Photos. The nondestructive way that Photos and the extensions work with your images is excellent. Although Tonality and Snapheal already had added extensions there were also updates to the Creative Kit versions available this morning. The downloads didn’t work absolutely perfectly, for two of them I had to do the download twice, but we got there in the end!

Working with extensions in Photos

The fact that the work you do with the extensions is reversible, is good. However, there will be times when you want to make sure you don’t lose the work you’ve done. If you made a set of detailed changes to an image using an extension and back in Photos you use the revert to original, you will lose all of those changes you made. You might use that revert button if you decide you want to work from the original again. So that’s how you might lose the work you already have done. The way to get around this is to make a duplicate of the photo in the first instance before you make any changes to it. Or you could do the duplicate of the photo after the changes have been made and then use the revert button either of the two photos.

If you are interested in finding out more about iPad art applications here is an eBook / PDF format about iPad art. I’m working on a large ‘how to’ style ebook going into depth using my favourite iPad art books and it will on the eBooks stores soon.