From an Idea to the App Store in 16 Days

The story starts back in June 2014, While sitting at the WWDC Keynote. Craig Federighi announced iCloud Photo Library is coming with iOS 8 and OS X 10.10. Being amateur photographer I was fighting all kind of services to store my photos online both for backup and easy browsing. I have not so big library of ~ 200 GB of photos and I didn’t find any solution since Everpix death.

Finally! I am going to be able to store all my photos on iCloud, browse them on the iPhone and manage them with the same app and not for so high price. The only problem was small sentence “It’s coming in 2015". He was talking about the Photos.app for the OS X. This app will replace iPhoto and Aperture and bring the iCloud Photo Library to the Mac too and I will be able to throw my whole library to the cloud.

I waited and waited and as time passed I became impatient. Few months ago Federico Viticci started to be impatient too and copied all his library to the iPhone and from there to iCloud. I decided to do the same and used AirDrop to copy all the photos i ever took with one of my iPhones — around 3000 photos and 100 videos ~ 20 GB. After some upload time it was all there!

The first thing I noticed is that my library is messed up, some photos were placed in the wrong years and wrong locations — I did some digging and found out that some photos metadata was incorrect and Apple’s algorithm for ordering was wrong about them. I started to search for an app to help me edit the location and creation date of my photos but nothing. Maybe the Photos.app for OS X will solve it but who knows when and if it will.

I started reading the API of the new Photos.framework (currently only for iOS) and quickly discovered APIs for exactly that. Later that Saturday I had working POC. I played with it few days and shared it on Facebook & Twitter.

Later that week I was able to send TestFlight Beta to around 80 people and about half of them installed the app. I got a lot of feedback and bug reports and wrote all as GitHub issues. On Saturday I sat down and fixed everything I needed and wanted ☺. I used the app to organize my photo library and when I finished I sent it to Apple for review!

Today, after 9 days of review it’s finally ready for download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photo-organizer-view-edit/id954717485?ls=1&mt=8

I still have more than 100 feature requests and I am not sure if I will implement them or not.

Update 1:

I got some really good feedback from users, some even offered to pay for the app ☺

Update 2:

Photos.app for OS X beta is out.

The good news you can now edit the creation date, the bad news you still can’t mass edit the creation date and can’t edit location of photos (rdar://19756942).