Everpix was the perfect photo back-up and sharing service for me and ever since it folded, I’ve been waiting for Apple to come in and fill the void.¹ for the last year and a half I’ve been limping along with Picturelife, a service that mostly checks all the boxes for what I need², but with less elegant execution than I’d like³.

But with my ballooning photo library pushing me into a pricier storage tier with Picturelife, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Photos for Mac, announced last summer at WWDC. And this week, after the mysterious case of the disappearing Photos for Mac references on Apple’s website, we finally see new signs of life in the OS X 10.10.3 Developer Beta. There are certainly still many questions left to be answered, not the least of which is, “Can we really trust iCloud with our precious photos?”

My hope is that Apple recognizes the importance we place on our digital memories. They seem to get it with the iPhone⁴, but their attention, or lack thereof, to iPhoto and Aperture and recent issues with iCloud don’t exactly instill the greatest confidence in the minds of the public. Apple seems to be taking their time with Photos, and my optimistic take is that they’re being deliberate, working diligently to ensure the syncing mechanism on the back-end is rock solid. The early reviews of the front-end sound promising, at least for iPhoto power- or Aperture light-users. I participate in Apple’s AppleSeed consumer beta testing program, so I look forward to taking Photos for a spin soon.