Apple May Be Killing iPhoto, But It Sounds Like The New Photo App Will Be A Lot More Powerful

Last week, Apple announced it would halt development on two of the company's signature photography applications, Aperture and iPhoto, instead shifting its focus to the new Photos app introduced at WWDC last month.

For those worried the Photos app might not be robust enough to handle the needs of professional users, Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech learned from an Apple representative that the new Photos app will include "professional-grade features such as image search, editing, effects, and most notably, third-party extensibility."

Here's the full statement from Apple:

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.

You read that correctly: Though Photos may eventually introduce some great features for professional and casual photographers alike, Photos for the Mac won't be available when OS X Yosemite ships this fall. It will instead release at some point in 2015.

However, the inclusion of third-party extensibility in the new Photos app will be a nice touch.

For those uninitiated, Apple introduced "extensibility," or app extensions, at its WWDC keynote last month, which is Apple's way of letting applications talk to each other and even project software elements into other apps while still maintaining a highly secure environment.

In the case of Photos, this means app developers will soon be able to build sharing options within the Photos app to link to their own applications. For example, this could let users apply photo-filters from third party apps that aren't available in the new Photos app.

The new Photos app will offer plenty of tools to keep your photos looking beautiful and organized, and it's all tied together with a search engine that lets you explore your photos based on the date or time the photo was taken, its location, or by albums or favorites. You can also drag and drop your photos to customize the order in which they're displayed, and all of your changes will immediately auto-sync across all your devices.