12 New Features in Mac Photos

Apple added a whole bunch of new features in the Mac Photos app with macOS Ventura. Learn how to find duplicates, remove the background, copy and paste adjustments and much more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in Photos in macOS Ventura. 
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So when you upgrade your Mac to Ventura you also move to Photos version 8.0., which adds a variety of useful new features. Let's start off with a simple one. Now your Hidden and Recently Deleted folders are locked! Notice here the little padlock next to each one of them. If you don't see Hidden you can always go to View, and this is where you would Hide or Show the Hidden Photo album. When you select a photo you can choose to Hide it and then it will move into that album and not be visible in your library. Now in order to View those you would have to select it and then it is going to ask you to enter your password. This is your computer account password so the same one you enter when to log into your Mac. Once you enter that in you can view what's there. The same thing is true of Recently Deleted. There is a setting for this in Photo, Settings under Privacy. There's a checkbox there for Use Password for Hidden and Recently Deleted albums. 
Next we've got a special Duplicate's Album here. This will show you any duplicates that the Photos App finds in your library. So select that and you'll see the duplicates as pairs or even more than that if there are three or more photos that are identical. Now a few notes here. First you'll only see duplicates here if any duplicates are found. If none are found it won't be there. Second, when you upgrade to Ventura you're not going to see this right away. It takes time to find these. So give it a day or two and don't keep the Photos App running. When you have it running your Mac assumes that you are using it and it won't spend time looking for duplicates. So Quit the Photos App. Let your Mac sleep overnight as you usually would and check the next day. Now when you have duplicates here you can select one or the other and delete it as normal. Just press the delete key. You could also double-click to View and then you can use the arrow keys to move between them. You could also look at information here, like the size. But you can see at some point I compressed it or maybe resized it and brought it back into the Photos App. The Photos App was still able to identify these as duplicates. Sometimes the duplicates will actually be different photos. Maybe photos you took accidentally one right after the other, you know hitting the shutter button a little too fast. In that case there might be differences which is why it is important to review what's there and see if they are identical or not and determine which one you want to keep. Otherwise if you click the Merge button it's going to keep the one that is higher resolution. The one that is going to be to the left. Also note that if you merge items if you've added information, like for instance captions or tags or you've put those in an album, then all of the information will be merged. So if this photo was in one album and this photo was in another album after merging then the one remaining photo would be in both of those albums. Captions and titles and all of that would be combined in the one photo remaining. 
Another new thing you can do is you can Copy and Paste Adjustments. So let me go into this photo here and I'm going to Edit it and then I'm going to choose Adjust here and then I'm going to make some adjustments. Like let's adjust the light and the coloring and let's say I get it just like I want. I can now go to Image and then Copy Edit, Shift Command C. Then I can go to another photo. I can go in and Edit that photo or I can just select it and then I can go to Image and then Paste Edit and it will apply the changes to that photo as well. Really useful if you've taken a group of photos of the same scene and you want to apply the same color adjustments. You could also select Many Photos and paste the edits to all of those. 
A new tool we have for editing photos is a Perspective Change. Let's go to Edit here and I'm going to go to Crop. Now one thing you may notice is you no longer have the little wheel here to change the rotation of the photo. But you do have it right here under Crop, Straighten. I can rotate that way. So the same functionality just in a different format. But added to that now are Vertical and Horizontal Perspective shifts. So the photo of this building wasn't taken straight-on. But I can adjust that by adjusting the Vertical and Horizontal to get it just right. 
Now a huge new feature of the Photos App is the ability to use the new iCloud Shared Photo Library and I have a completely different video tutorial on that. But here you can see I have it turned On. If you go into Photos Settings under Shared Library this is where you would turn it On. You would need to already be using iCloud Photos and this allows you to share your library with someone else. Essentially what it does is it creates two separate libraries. One is Personal and the other is Shared. You can view both at the same time. So you could see everything just as before but you can see which photos are part of your Shared Library and which are not. Then you can switch from one to the other and anything in your Shared Library would be seen by other people that also have that Shared Library. So this is a great way to have a Shared Library between you and your family. 
A small but useful feature under People is now you can move to View and you can Sort right here and you can sort ascending or descending by title. So in this case you're not going to see any difference. But if you had a bunch of people pinned here to the top it would sort those alphabetically and you had all the rest of the people down here. Those  would now be sorted alphabetically with that feature turned on. 
Now a feature outside of Photos, but related to the Photos App, is how you attach or import a photo. The Photo Picker has changed. So let's look at how it works in Mail. It's not too impressive in Mail because I click Attach, then I have to select Photos here on the left, and now I don't have the ability to choose albums or anything like that. I can just kind of Search in my Photos. It seems like a step backwards but in an app like Pages I get this. If I click Media and then Photos I get a whole sidebar here that allows me to see all the things that I have in my Photos Library. So there is Library Favorites. I've got Media types, Albums, Shared Albums, all of that listed here on the left and then I can select what photo I want here on the right.
Also outside of the Photos App you now have the ability to access your photos in Spotlight. So I'm going to do a Spotlight Search with Command Space. So let's search for, say, flowers here. Among the results I'll see photos from Apps. I can click on Show More here and you could see I see Photos in the Finder but also from the Photos App as well. So you could search by category like that or you can search for Tags, or you can search for people. 
Back in the Photos App if we go to the Memories one change you'll see is that Memories can now use actual real songs, not kind of canned music if you are using Apple Music. So I'll go into this one here, I'll pause it right here, and if I go to Music you can see you can use songs by artists here from Apple Music. You could pick to use another one. 
If those of us that don't necessarily like to see Memories appear here on the left you can now turn that Off. In Photos, Settings you can go to General and then you can turn Off Memories in featured content. Make it go away there. You can also turn Off Holiday Events and Notifications from Memories. 
Before we had the ability to get live text from Photos, copy the text out of a photo. Now you can do the same thing but in a video as well. So all you need to do is go to a portion of the video. You have to have the video paused to do it and then you'll see how you can actually select text and you can Copy it, look it up, translate, all of that just like you can in a still image. This works in other apps as well. So here I am in Quick Time Player and I can select the text right here.
Last, but certainly not least, is the ability to now Copy the subject from a photo. So you can go into a photo like this and if you Control Click on it, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, you get the option to Copy Subject. If you just move the pointer over it notice how it is going to highlight the subject that if finds in the photo. The algorithm that does this isn't perfect, so it is not always going to get it exactly right. You can always, of course, use a third party image editing app if you really do need to capture the subject in a fine tuned kind of way but this will work to copy the subject and then go into another app, like here is a Mail message, and then you can Paste it in. You can see I get the subject without the background. This works in other apps as well. Plus in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote if you have the latest versions of those as well, you can do it right there in the App. So I brought in this whole photo here into Pages. If I go to Image notice now I've got a Remove Background option this is more complex than it was before. It will use the same Copy Subject functionality to figure out the subject and remove the background. But you can also Click and Drag if you'd rather select the background manually using the old instant alpha function. But as you can see this works a lot better in this situation. So now I just have the subject there from that photo and the rest is transparent. 
So I think Apple did a really good job here in Photos 8.0 of adding new features to the Photos App without changing the existing features very much. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 16 Responses to “12 New Features in Mac Photos”

nick

11 months ago

Hey Gary, I'm not sure how the Sharing option in Photos is different from what was already available. Our family has been sharing photos albums for a while, and it's not apparent to me how this new feature is different. Thx.

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: See my video on it here and hopefully that will explain it: https://macmost.com/how-to-use-the-new-icloud-shared-photo-library.html

Jason Gold

Gary -- Is there a way to merge duplicates in bulk? Photos found 3,000+ dups in my collection! It's taking me a long time to merge each pair/group. Thanks. Jason

Jason: Yes there is, but I highly recommend against using it. Photos are too valuable. Go in and make sure before you delete. 3000 can be done 100 at a time (50 duplicates) here and there and eventually you'll be done.

Juan

Hi Gary, the copy and paste option is only applicable under adjustment feature, crop and/or leveling are not enabled?

Juan: Right. It only makes sense for adjustments. You typically wouldn't want to crop different images to the same thing.

I was thinking on timelapse photo process.

Juan: Oh, I see. But you'll need to take the photos into another app to do that anyway, so might as well do the cropping there.

Norm

Is there anyway while viewing photos in your library to determine whether a particular photo is in an album. When I used Photoshop in the past it would show under the photo (like titles) if the photo was in an album. I guess when in doubt, you can always move to the album of choice - it won't duplicate the photo in the album. Thanks for showing the new features.

Norm: Yes, there's no way to see a list of albums a photo is already in. But placing there again won't duplicate it or anything like that, so no harm.

Mark Flannery

10 months ago

I have Ventura 13.0.1. In Photos 8.0, there is no Duplicates album as shown in your video. What am I missing?

Mark: Watch the video and I explain at 1:32.

Bill Ferrol

6 months ago

Hi Gary I used the find duplicates photos and merged them. One thing that did happen which I wasn't aware of was the merged photo took on the date of merging and now I have a bunch of photos from 2016 to date that are all showing the date in March 23 that I merged them in the 'get info' option. Were you aware of this and is there any way of retaining the original dates the photos were taken? Many thanks. Bill

Bill: Are you sure they changed? I haven't seen that before. The photo date should remain the same.

Hi Gary I just checked and I have over 200 merged photos with the same date and the times are within seconds of each other as I completed the merges.

Bill: But where exactly are you checking the date and time? For instance, the file date and time are not the same as the metadata date and time and that is not the same as the Photos library date and time.

12 New Features in Mac Photos

Comments: 16 Responses to “12 New Features in Mac Photos”

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