BIG problems with PHOTOS & icloud/PHOTOS with large photos library

I have worked with three different photo managing applications, made by Apple - iPhoto, Aperture, Photos for more than twenty years now. None of them has been designed to preserve the sequence of photos in albums, when moving albums around, duplicating albums, adding the photos from albums to a slideshow or use them as screensaver, and particularly, when syncing albums between devices. Most of the time selected photos are treated as a random set of photos, not an ordered sequence. The Photos user guide is nowhere promising to preserve the sorting of items, when we select an album or photos in an album, to do something with them, for example create a slideshow from them or a Memory. It is hard to tell a story with our photos, when Photos is giving priority to an esthetical layout instead of our custom sort order for dramatical reasons.

I don't think it is a bug, as Apple does not promise in the documentation to keep albums sorted when syncing or exporting, it is a neglected feature. I am disappointed that the developers cannot understand, why the sorting of photos albums, slideshows, memories is so important when presenting our photos, and that we are investing a lot of work and time into the sorting, and that it should preserved with a high priority when transferring photos between devices or archiving our photos.

I think you need to be realistic. Photos is a free app. It's aimed squarely at people shooting with iPhones who - frankly - want the app to do the work involved in processing and organising the images for them. You get what you pay for. More demanding users need more powerful applications.

And if you stopped using Photos, how much would you save? Nothing. You'd still need to spend that money for that hardware. The price won't come down $10 if you say you won't use Photos. Use it or don't, the price remains the same. Exactly like a scenario where the app is free, no?

So, yes, of course, the cost of developing the app is sunk into the device cost. But the point is to remember who the app is aimed at. It's not for everyone, nor is it meant to be. Photos is not the best photo app ever made. It's not even the best photo app Apple ever made. But it is created to be effective at its price point for a cohort of users. Not every Apple user by a long shot. It's the same with Pages/Numbers etc. The app is designed in a way that leaves space in the ecosystem for third party developers to produce more powerful applications aimed at more demanding users.

Aperture has been leading edge technology for professionals, and still very intuitive to use.

But it has been strictly limited to a local single user library - no attempt to create a shared cloud library or syncing the full library between our devices.

Given the Apple universe of many different device models - Macs with Apple silicon or Intel processors, iPhones, iPads, iPod touch, Apple TV, and many different system versions with different versions of Photos, it is a very daunting task to support iCloud syncing of the complete library. Apple is wise to keep the Photos.app and the Photos Library simple and basic on all platforms to be able to cope with the many dependencies on the different platforms. Testing and maintaining the different version must be a nightmare.

I am sticking with Photos for the time being, as most of my devices are made by Apple.

I am using it mainly as a DAM to sync with iCloud, with PowerPhotos as a second browser for my Photos Libraries, many AppleScripts (I like to program!) and Houdah Geo to manage the metadata. For advanced editing I am using Luminar Neo. I like photo centric editing tools in Luminar, but not the price policy and aggressive advertising of the manufacturer.

Check out Mylio

https://mylio.com/

It's very good with large libraries and is excellent at sharing across devices. Support is good too.

So Apple 400B$ company is making free SW?

How much did you pay for it?