5/12/23
9:00 am

10 Things You Are Missing Out On If You are Not Using the Photos App

If you aren't using the Photos app, check out these 10 reasons to give it a try. Often when someone avoids using an app like Photos it is because of misconceptions or not realizing that the app has evolved since they last tried it.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If you're not already using the Photos App on your Mac let me give you ten reasons to start. 
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Now if seems like I often run into people that use their Mac to organize and store photos but aren't doing it with the Photos App. Sometimes the reason for that is they don't realize how many features are in the Photos App or they still have an idea that the Photos App is like it was ten years ago. So starting with reason number ten let's look at some of the adjustment features you've got in the Photos App. You can do a lot in here. It's not just a place to store your photos. You can also Edit them. 
So, for instance, if you want to take a photo like this and you look at it and you don't think the colors really represent how vibrant everything looked when you saw this in person you can click Edit here and then you could go to Adjust and then you have Light and Color adjustments. So I can go here under light. I can increase the highlights, the shadows, maybe adjust the brightness. I can go into Color and I can increase the saturation, the vibrance, and so on to get it to look like I remember it. There are a ton of other adjustments you can make and also a whole set of different filters that you can use. It's easy to compare your adjusted photo with the original, like that, to see the changes you've made. 
Now you can also do Retouching in Photos. I was surprised recently to find out that a lot of people didn't know this. So in the same place under Edit there is a Retouch tool here. You can adjust the size of the brush. You can turn it On or Off. Then you can drag over areas to retouch your photos. In addition to that you also have a set of Cropping tools. So you can Crop. You can straighten which is Rotate. You can adjust Perspective as well. 
Another misconception people have about the Photos App is that once you make adjustments now you've changed the photo permanently. But making changes in the Photos App is nondestructive. Which means you can go back to this photo here, where I've made those adjustments, and if I go to Edit notice you have Revert To Original. So you could always go back to the original photo. The changes are just made on top of that and the original is always stored in your library. 
Now another thing people don't realize is that you can use external editors in conjunction with Photos. So I can use those adjustment tools and I can crop and all that inside of Photos without the need for another app. But I could also choose Image and then Edit With and I've got various applications, Pixelmator Pro, I could use PhotoShop, I can use Acorn, I can use Affinity Photo. Let's give that a try. You can see it opens it up right here. Let's make some adjustments here, like this. I'll Save. Then back here in Photos I can see the changes applied and I can still use Revert To Original to go back to the original version. In addition to that you can also go to Edit and there's a bunch of extensions here. So some apps like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro will actually add extensions so you can edit effects directly without having to open the whole app. 
Now one of the primary purposes of Photos is to organize and you've got several ways to do that. For instance, you could go and create a New Album and take these albums and put different photos in there. Photos, of course, can be in more than one album. They are kind of like playlists in the Music App. The photos is only in your library once. But you can have it in multiple albums just so you can view groups of photos together. In addition to that you could also go to individual photos and you could apply keywords and you can create whatever keywords you want, apply them to different photos, and then view or search for photos by keywords. So you can Tag your photos as much as you want. Photos doesn't force you into any organizational system. So you can use albums or not use albums at all. Or you can keywords or not use keywords at all. Or you can use one or both, whatever you want to do. 
In addition there's a bunch of automatic ways that photos organized for you. One thing it does is it recognizes people. If you go to People here, in my sample library I just have pictures of myself, but I can go in and I can see all the pictures where my face has been recognized. So it is doing this automatically. After you person and indicate a couple of photos where that person is it will find other photos with that person. You can confirm additional photos. You can go in and make adjustments if it gets it wrong. But for the most part it gets it right and it is easy to find photos of a particular person or even do searches for a person or photo that maybe has two or three specific people in it. 
But that's not the only thing that Photos recognizes. It also recognizes objects and other elements inside of photos. So you can search for something like flowers. It will find photos with flowers in them. Or waterfall, or animals, or sunset.
Now just because you can have albums and you can tag your photos with keywords  doesn't mean you have to. As a matter of fact I don't do either. Instead I just use the automatic organization that is in the Photos App. So I can go to Library here and I can go to years and everything is grouped by years. I can go to months and see months like this. Even days. It is not going to do individual days but it will group days together based also on location. So, for instance, if you go on a trip somewhere or visit a specific place over a few days then you're going to see those grouped together. It's really easy to find photos even if you haven't done any organization at all. 
Now a thing you might want to do with photos is to share them with other people. You may want to upload them to social media or you may just want to put them on a webpage where other people can see them. Some people will go to a special website, signup for a service and create these albums and share photos that way. But you can do it easily right from the photos app using iCloud. You could select a bunch of photos, I'll select these 4 here, you could click the Share button there, create a Shared Album and then add them to it. Once you've created the Shared Album you go back to Edit it, you can click here and you can decide who can see it. You can invite specific people but you could also make it just public so anybody with a link can see it. It is ridiculously easy to share your photos online using the Photos App. 
Which brings me, I think, to the biggest feature to using the Photos App. That's iCloud Photos. So by storing your photos to iCloud you have a bunch of benefits. One is you can store more photos than you have space for on your local drive. By using iCloud here, having that checked, and Optimize Mac Storage, this means that only some of your photos will be cached locally so you can use iCloud space to store your photos. Even if you run out of space on your local hard drive you can still keep adding photos as long as you have space on iCloud. But you don't have to use that. You can still use Download Originals to this Mac and have everything stored locally at all times. But the great thing about using iCloud is that it syncs with your iPhone, your iPad, maybe other Macs automatically.
So, for instance, if you were to use the Camera App on your iPhone and take a picture, I'll take a quick selfie here, then it is going to add that to your Photos Library on your iPhone. Then you could see it's syncing that item to iCloud from your iPhone. Once it is synced to iCloud then your Mac will then get the photo as well. You could see it appear there. Your iPhone and your Mac don't need to be in the same place for this. You could be halfway around the world. It will still sync to iCloud and then to your other devices. The other end of that is that you have all of your photos here on your iPhone. Even if you're using iCloud for storage they are all accessible. So you can use your photos organized on your Mac all the time. But then say you're out to dinner with someone and you want to show them a vacation photo from six months ago you can just do that here on your iPhone in the Photos App since you're using iCloud. It's basically having all the photos you ever took right her with you in your pocket all the time. 
That's my favorite feature, not just for Photos, but of the entire Apple Ecosystem. Having all your photos with you everywhere. So if t seems like I'm a big fan of the Photos App, well that's because I am. If you're not using it I encourage you to try it. Just take some of your photos and put them into the Photos App. See how you can make adjustments. See how you can use the different organizational tools. See how it works with iCloud. I think you'll like it and find it just as useful as I do. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 27 Responses to “10 Things You Are Missing Out On If You are Not Using the Photos App”

Jerry Morris

2 years ago

Currently I have 14,000 photos in 1 Library. I have created Albums that relate to events. It is almost impossible to find a single picture in the library go delete. Is there a way to delete a picture in the Library by selecting the picture in an Album?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Jerry: Yes. If you select a photo in an album, look in the Image menu. You'll see both a Remove command (Delete key) and a Delete command (Command+Delete). Remove removes from the album, but Delete will delete from your library.

Jim Esher

2 years ago

I have metadata selected so I can see the name of the photo. It's visible in the main library but when I move a photo into an album the name does not move with it. Is there a way to turn on metadata in the albums

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Jim: If you see titles in the Library, you should see them in albums as well. Maybe you are viewing the album in Square mode? Try Option+T.

Paul Jansen

2 years ago

I have a couple of questions:
1. I have 15 years of digital camera photos to import, will Photos handle this?
2. I am reluctant to have photos stored only inside Photos - I want to have an independent backup of all the image files that is platform independent.
3. Is it possible to have shared albums linked to Family sharing?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Paul: 1. 15 years? Is that 50 photos or 500,000 photos?
2. OK. That will take a lot of extra work (and storage) as you'll need to put your photos in two places. Or, you could just occasionally export all of your photos to an external drive.
3. Check out https://macmost.com/how-to-use-the-new-icloud-shared-photo-library.html

Paul Jansen

2 years ago

Gary:
1. 60,000 photos and 5,000 videos. Getting on for 500GB in all. Can Photos handle this?
2. Photos are the only digital asset that cannot be rebuilt form other records so I am rather paranoid about having multiple independent backups (currently on two computers and 3 external hard drives...)

Paul Jansen

2 years ago

Gary: Are items in photos stored in their native format or some proprietary format?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Paul: Maybe consider only putting photos in your Photos library? I'll bet most of the space is from those 5,000 videos. Photos can handle it as long as you have a nice big and fast internal drive. 60,000 photos isn't that much, but 5,000 videos is a lot. Photos are stored as their original files and you can export the original files any time you like. You can also use Photos in a mode where it merely links to the photo files and doesn't store them in the library. But then you can't use those with iCloud.

Liz

2 years ago

Am I doing something wrong? I have my photos synced to the cloud but on my MacBook Pro it eats all my available space as all are saved locally as well as on the cloud. Is there some way to stop that I haven’t found?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Liz: In Photos, go to Photos, Settings. Then under iCloud, turn on "Optimize Mac Storage." It may take a while (maybe overnight) for you to get some space back.

Derek Handforth

2 years ago

I have 30K photos on my Mac and have my settings to optimise storage. Therefore the masters are on iCloud not the Mac. I backup my Mac using TimeMachine. Will this backup all my photos or just the ones that happen to be on my Mac at that time. If not how do I backup my entire library?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Derek: It will only back up the ones present. Turn off Optimize to back up them all. Or, maybe just export them as a one-time thing to an external drive if you like.

Jerry Aubertin

2 years ago

Gary, having problems with syncing my iMac to iCloud share on devices all my other devices iPhones iPads are set up but when I try setting up iMac, when I click on iCloud I get a message," iCloud features for photos are only available in the systems photo library. Please help I would like this option to share my photos across all my devices Jerry.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Jerry: Do you have more than one library? If so, you have to be using your System Library to use iCloud Photos. If you only have one, or would like to make the current library your System Library, go to Photos, Settings, General.

Barbara Hooper

2 years ago

I have several photo libraries that are basically duplicates of the photo library that Apple Photos uses. Can I delete them? if so, how do I do that?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Barbara: How did they get there? Are you sure they are duplicates with the same photos? Make sure you are 100% they are duplicates and you won't lose anything by deleting them. They are just files like any other and you can drag them to the trash.

Mark Flannery

2 years ago

If I take a photo with my iPhone, is it automatically stored in iCloud and the Photos app? If yes, is there any reason to retain it in the iPhone Camera app?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Mark: Photos are not "in" your Camera app. They are in the Photos app. You take a photo and it automatically is added to your Photos library. If your Photos library is using iCloud, then the library is in iCloud.

MarkH

2 years ago

I'm confused by iCloud Photos and statements that I can store more photos on iCloud than on my local drive. This is backwards: Apple iCloud is a miserly 5GB and I have 250GB locally plus external backup drives with TBs of storage. I've never found much use for iCloud. I store a file or two there but Spotlight won't find the file by name even when I'm staring right at it! (I'd screenshot this.) My free Google drive has about 9GB stored on it which I download occasionally to clear it out.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Mark: iCloud storage is only 5GB at the starting (free) level. You can buy up to 2TB of storage, which is what I have. I have enough storage on my Mac Studio to not need to Optimize my Photos library, but I use this option for my smaller MacBook Air and it is automatically on for my iPhone and iPad which don't have nearly enough space. Being able to see all of my photos across all of my devices at all times is amazing.

MarkH

2 years ago

Gary, if you had to stop paying the $120 per year to maintain that library, how do you save or backup all your photos to an independent source? Where do your pictures go if they are in the iCloud? Do they stay locked behind the paywall until you re-up the subscription again? Do they get backed up inside the giant ApplePhotos Library.photoslibrary file?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

MarkH: Your pictures remain if you stop paying, but you can't add anymore until you clear off space. So you have time to download them. You can download them all in a variety of ways, such as simply turning off Optimize in Photos.

Jason Gold

2 years ago

Gary -- Agree completely that the last item you mention is perhaps the very best part of the Apple ecosystem. I often settle arguments with friends when out to dinner as to when and where was the last time (or first time) we had dinner together. I quickly pull up photos after a quick search for the friend's face. Sometimes I'll pull up prior visits at the restaurant we are dining at (I usually take few shots when we are our to dinner).

Jason Gold

2 years ago

Gary -- When viewing an existing photo I also sometimes use the mini-map in the info pane to confirm where a picture was taken; not just the geographic location but even the name of, for example, the restaurant. Really useful and cool feature.

margaret parkes

2 years ago

Hi Gary, I have all my photos on Photos on my Mac and would like to put some, but not all, on the cloud to be able to access them from mu oPad or phone. Is there some way to put them in a folder which can then be stored in iCloud?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Margaret: Answering that depends on the "why." Why do you want to put some but not all of your photos in iCloud?

Comments Closed.

10 Things You Are Missing Out On If You are Not Using the Photos App

Comments: 27 Responses to “10 Things You Are Missing Out On If You are Not Using the Photos App”

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