Apple Releases OS X 10.10.3 with Photos App, New Emoji

Apple released version 10.10.3 of OS X Yosemite today, bringing a new Photos app that works with iCloud Photo Library from iOS 8, 300 new emoji, and a slew of bug fixes. We’re working on our Photos article – in the meantime, iMore has done an excellent job in covering iCloud Photo Library and the new app.

I use OS X twice a week at this point, so I only installed the public beta of 10.10.3 last week and took the Photos app for a quick spin. Since late last year, iCloud Photo Library has become my only photo management solution, where I’ve transferred about nine years of photos from all my devices. The new Photos app for Mac took a couple of minutes to download my library; after that, it showed the same collections and edits as my iPhone and iPad. The process was painless.

I’ve upgraded my iCloud account twice to put everything in iCloud Photo Library, and I couldn’t be happier. There have been many cautionary tales about Apple’s cloud services and photo management apps, but I think they nailed it this time. I’m happy with iCloud Photo Library because it’s seamlessly integrated with my iPhone’s camera and photos – I don’t have to manually upload anything, and I don’t have to think about managing photos. This is quite the departure from what I used to do, and I like how I’m not wasting time with scripts anymore.

For this reason, I welcome Photos for OS X. Even if not for me, I like knowing that my photos – the same photos I keep on other devices – will show up on my Mac as well.