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

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. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

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.