Remember Apple’s Photos app for OS X? It made a brief appearance at WWDC and at the time, Apple stated it would come out in early 2015. It’s early 2015 now, and while Photos isn’t yet available to the general public, Apple now says it’ll release the app sometime this Spring.
If you’re an OS X developer, however, you don’t have to wait until then: According to MacRumors, the newly released OS X 10.10.3 developer beta comes with the new Photos app, so you’ll be able to take it for a spin before the rest of us.
Presumably, members of the OS X Public Beta program will get a pre-release version of OS X 10.10.3 and the Photos app at some point, but as far as we can tell, Apple hasn’t made any announcement regarding that.
Photos for OS X will come with built-in support for iCloud Photo Library, and if it works as advertised, shuffling photos between all your Macs and iOS devices should become pretty seamless. Our Shadoe Huard thinks this could be a pretty big deal, and that it may seriously simplify managing photos across devices.
If you’re a fan of Aperture and iPhoto, however, your photo app of choice is running out of time: As The Loop notes, Apple has stopped development of its existing photo apps, so those apps may disappear from the Mac App Store at some point in the near future.
In the meantime, check out Apple’s new Photos preview site and get a feel for what the new Photos app will be capable of.
