# Apple's Photos for Mac Developer Preview Released



## iKenndac (Feb 5, 2015)

I downloaded it and gave it a try.

First impressions: It's not going to replace Lightroom (or Aperture) for a while. There's some basic editing tools, but it's clearly designed for the typical consider in mind. 

However! It is _so_ fast. I imported 1000 RAW images from my 6D (20MP) and it *flies* compared to Lightroom. The UI is silky smooth, scrolling is a dream and live adjustments are crazy fast. It's clearly using my GPUs for rendering, and I'm having so much fun flipping between all my photos. 

Seriously, Adobe should take a look at this and feel ashamed. _This_ is how fast Lightroom should be. If Apple can do it, so can you!


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## Tinky (Feb 6, 2015)

iKenndac said:


> If Apple can do it, so can you!



Not always the case. Apple have been known to favour graphics cards that work great for their own GPU purposes but aren't so hot with Adobe. On the old mac pro tower a decent adobe compatable card was a £1000 option, otherwise you were getting nowhere near full potential.

Apple would rather you used their software, which is probably why my next mac will be a hackintosh or just a plain old pc.


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## iKenndac (Feb 6, 2015)

That makes no sense - all these cards are standard ATI/nVidia cards. Adobe should make their software work with the hardware shipped in modern machines - at the moment LR isn't GPU accelerated at all on any platform. The fact that it's dog slow on Windows further shows how behind the curve they are.


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## helpful (Feb 6, 2015)

iKenndac said:


> That makes no sense - all these cards are standard ATI/nVidia cards. Adobe should make their software work with the hardware shipped in modern machines - at the moment LR isn't GPU accelerated at all on any platform. The fact that it's dog slow on Windows further shows how behind the curve they are.



You are right. Even if Apple has secret access to some mysterious OS features (which isn't true), Adobe would still be able to take advantage of standard GPU acceleration.

Lightroom 5 takes advantage of only the CPU, is far from being fully optimized even for single-threaded tasks (not quite as important to performance in today's world), is even worse at taking advantage of multiple CPUs (very important in today's world), and is zero at taking advantage of GPU power (most important in today's world).

Lightroom 6 is being partially rewritten, but as for today, Lightroom 5 is like a horse facing backwards in a race.


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## LDS (Feb 6, 2015)

There's a lot in LR that is written in LUA, a scripting language. It will never as fast as compiled code, especially if well optimized for a single platform without having to cope with two different ones.
Also application designed to do less can be written to be speedier.


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## Tinky (Feb 6, 2015)

iKenndac said:


> That makes no sense - all these cards are standard ATI/nVidia cards. Adobe should make their software work with the hardware shipped in modern machines - at the moment LR isn't GPU accelerated at all on any platform. The fact that it's dog slow on Windows further shows how behind the curve they are.



They should. But I think it was kind of revenge for iOS not supporting flash. Apple had big spats with Digidesign (the people behind ProTools, now part of Avid) and a generation of decent hardware was obselete by the next OS.

You would think they would... they should... etc doesn't translate to pound or dollar.


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