A few wishes for Photos for OS X

I’ve just crested 40,000 photos in my Photos for OS X library with about 20,000 more to import from Picturelife. After using the app for a few days I have a few things I’d love to see in future updates.

  • Speed – My 60-some-odd-thousand photos is far from abnormal. I would think that Photos for OS X should be built to handle hundreds-of-thousands of photographs. Speed is a big deal.
  • External storage of originals only – I’d like to have my library’s thumbnails and metadata on my local storage and keep the originals on an external drive. This would make Photos significantly faster and allow me to edit metadata even when away from my desk.
  • Better Smart Album options – Smart Albums are nice but there aren’t a lot of options to create them with. I’d like to see aspect ratio, exact pixels, color, and several other options added.
  • Object detection – I have no idea what these should be called but Google Photos can detect things in photos and make albums automatically. Google Photos finds cats, cars, lakes, the sky, people, etc. I hope Photos for OS X gets something similar.
  • Better automatic face detection – Photos is very good at detecting faces but I have to manually confirm thousands of positives. I feel like I’m just smashing my mouse button. It would be nice if Photos was a little more liberal with its auto-face-tagging.
  • See photos on a map – Nearly every photo in my library is geotagged. Searching for photos becomes a bit easier sometimes when I can start narrowing the results by location. And sometimes I don’t have the exact name of a place to type in.

So far I’m happy that I’m moving to Photos. I haven’t had my photo library local on my computer in at least two years and I’m almost there. I’m worried mostly about the performance of Photos. Everything else on this list would simply be nice to have.

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