Clearly Windows 8 has much to offer for touchscreen devices and those wanting a refreshed interface. But I've spent some time looking into the benefits for photographers who have laptops and desktop machines.
I'm not finding a lot of information about Windows 8 for photographers. So I thought that collectively we could compile what we know here. And to put even a finer point on it, let's take a specific example. (Although I want this discussion to cover all types of laptops and desktop machines. This example is just one I'm familiar with.)
I have an Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows 7 (64 bit) with 4 GBs of RAM, AMD C series processor, and 1366 x 768 resolution. The trackpad is decent. Windows 7 runs great on this machine, as does Lightroom 4.2 and Corel AfterShot Pro. As a photographer, what advantages, if any, would I get upgrading to Windows 8?
I think an important piece of information is that I won't be taking advantage of Microsoft Cloud services. My primary platform is Mac and iOS, so iCloud is my default.
Why should we even think about this now? Well, Microsoft is offering a pretty sweet upgrade offer that's good for a couple months. So it seems if one were to upgrade, 2012 would be the time.
So... photographers... let's tackle Windows 8 from our perspective. Please comment so we can compile a few data points here.
Photos App
Here's a recent post I found that talks some about the Photos app, saying, "The new Photos apps is one of my favorites, despite the fact that it’s fairly feature-limited. The Photos app ties together image collections from a variety of sources – your hard drive, Facebook, Flickr and Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service. I’ve got pictures scattered in many different locations, and this puts in them all in one place. I found photos I had forgotten about, thanks to this app."
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/10/windows-8-sleek-apps-for-mail-music-and-photos/
There's not really anything in Windows 8 geared specifically towards photographers, but it is still a worthy upgrade.
The best feature for me is Storage Spaces. It's mainly a desktop feature since it involves multiple drives. Storage spaces takes multiple drives and combines them into a pool. This can be used as a really big disk or it can duplicate things.
The other feature that is nice is file history. It's kind of like time machine without all the spacey graphics.
Of course though as with the push towards tablets and such as time goes on there will be plenty of photographer centric Metro style apps.
I think my computer is snappier since I installed Windows 8 on it. Even just the start up sequence seems faster, so that's a potential plus for photographers (and anyone else really) as the OS seems to better handle the computer's resources.
The photo app is OK, but I think we will need to wait a bit to get nicer apps that work in the Modern UI, it will take some time, it's a little early.
Kathy @ Cartridge Shop