Can’t find and open the Photos application in Mac OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite)

Question

I can’t find and open the Photos application—that has replaced the iPhotos application—on a Mac that is running Mac OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite).

I've looked in Finder, Launchpad, and Spotlight.

Answer 1

Yep. Photos was introduced in OS X Yosemite v10.10.3.

Let your Yosemite installation do all its software updates and Photos will be there.

The current version of Yosemite (as of this writing in early September 2015) is 10.10.5, so you're many months behind on updates, and thus missing out on security fixes and other critical bug fixes (Wi-Fi, Bonjour, etc.).

Answer 2

I can’t find and open the Photos application—that has replaced the iPhotos application—on a Mac that is running Mac OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite).

The problem is you are running Mac OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite) when the “Photos” app became a part of Mac OS X with version 10.10.3 as explained on the official Apple webpage for “Photos.”

OS X Yosemite (v10.10.3) now includes the Photos app.

And the accepted answer in this discussion on in Apple’s support forums—“Photo app in Yosemite 10.10.2?”—addresses attempting to get it for Mac OS X 10.10.2:

So far the only way to get the photos.app is by installing/upgrading to 10.10.3. Even if there was a way to install photos.app on an earlier version of OS X there is no warranty it will work on said version

So if you have Mac OS X 10.10.2, “iPhoto” is what you can use. And based on articles/tutorials such as this one it seems that there is a desire from some users to downgrade “Photos” to “iPhoto” out there:

Some users who have updated to new versions of OS X with Photos app have discovered that Photos app does not meet their needs, and thus would like to continue using iPhoto on the Mac. This is possible, at least for the time being, but there can be some hiccups in getting iPhoto running again in OS X Yosemite with Photos app installed.