How Apple has improved Photos in macOS 11

Apple improves its Photos app on all its platforms every year. The company understands that taking, editing and curating photo collections are important to almost every iPhone, iPad or Mac user, so what improvements to Photos does it introduce in macOS 11 Big Sur?

Editing and navigation improvements

The main focus in this year’s release of Photos for Mac is on editing and navigation improvements. That means expanded editing capabilities along with useful updates that will help you explore your collection of photos and videos. 

Apple continues to develop its machine learning tools.

With this in mind, Memories has been given a little more intelligence and should provide you with more relevant collections, and offers up a bunch of additional customisation tools, too.

Memories also brings you a larger selection of tracks that will automatically adapt to the length of your Memory movie. You’ll also finds that Memory movies seem to deliver a more stable experience when playing those movies.

On first glance

The first time you open Photos you’ll see one of the biggest visual changes in this release — the sidebars have been changed, which means you’ll be able to find images a little more easily.

What about photo editing?

Apple has added a new Vibrance effect to Photos. This attempts to make images more vibrant. On a granular basis, you can adjust the intensity of filters and Portrait Lighting effects. 

There are improvements for video editing, too. This means all the adjustments, filters, and cropping tools now work with video. That’s great as it means you can rotate, change exposure and apply filters to the movies you make.

One really useful improvement is the introduction of an improved Retouch tool.

Once again, this is an articulation of Apple’s machine learning systems, which the company promises now do an even better job of removing blemishes, dust specks and other artefacts from an image you want to improve.

Navigation gets better

When you’re looking for a specific image or simply exploring the photos and videos in your library, you’ll find that zooming in and out of the views of those collections is faster and more responsive. This extends to your albums and your complete collection.

Finally, you can also add captions

One welcome enhancement is the introduction of support for captions. This lets you view and edit captions in the Info panel. One more thing: if you use iCloud Photos the captions you make will automatically be synced your devices. You cabin also add captions on iPhones and iPads.