Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at the photo library on your iPhone. So I get asked this a lot, if you go into your photo album app on your iPhone, and you have some photos synced from your computer, you'll find an album, or at least it looks like an album, called photo library. People want to know, where does this come from, what is it? They don't have an album called photo library and they want to know why are the photos there.
So for my first example, I'm in iTunes on my Mac and I've got the iPhone 4S selected. I've got photos selected here at the top. I've set it to sync photos but not all photos, albums, and events. I've set it to only do selected ones and I've set it to no events. So it's only going to sync albums or events that I've checked off here on the right. I've checked off two albums: cool photos and Hawaii scenes.
Now if I switch over to my iPhone this is what it will look like once I've done the sync. I've got as you can see, the camera roll which are photos that I've taken on my iPhone. They're not included in this, but I've got cool photos and Hawaii scenes here. But also one called photo library. So photo library is the one that seems to confuse a lot of people. They don't understand how that got there. Well if you look at the numbers it tells a story right there. You can see that there's eights cool photos, 11 Hawaii scenes, and 19 photos in the photo library. If we look in cool photos you can see those eight. Look in Hawaii scenes, see those 11. If you look in photo library, you could see all of the photos all together. That's because the photo library is simply all of the photos that I've synced to my iPhone. It's a complete list.
So one concern people have is if they see the same photo in their photo library and in the album or event that it synced, their afraid that the photo is there twice taking up twice the amount of space on the iPhone. But it's not. It's only there once. You're just looking at two different lists. If you tap on your photo in the photo library, or tap on it in the album, you're going to view the same photo on your iPhone.
So here's another situation. I've got here the same two albums selected, but I've also selected the three most recent events sent. And you can see they're automatically checked off here. I can add more by checking them off individually. Now, when I sync that to my iPhone here's what I get. You can see that with albums selected I can still see cool photos and Hawaii scenes with the 19 photos total, but the photo library has many more. The extra ones, the 68 extra ones, are ones from events. Matter of fact if I look at events I can see that there's 68 right there. So photo library now combines the 19 from the two albums I've selected plus the 8 from, or 68 from the other events. And for a total of 87 photos in the library.
And what if the same photo is in both an event and an album? Well, then it's listed in your photo library but only there once. It's just a complete list of all the photos you have in your iPhone. It won't duplicate it because it's in one album and also in an event.
Think of how music is in iTunes. You can have a song that's in an album, and you can also put that same song in a playlist. And you can also look at a list of all your songs and see that song there. You know it's only there once in your library but you've got different listings and some of them show that song.
This is also similar to how it is in iPhoto because you can look at photos in iPhoto and see all your photos individually, but you can also look at events or albums in iPhoto and see the same photos there. The photo is not duplicated. You just in one case looking at a list of all of your photos, and in another case looking at a sub list of just some photos.