4/16/21
9:00 am

15 Things You May Not Know You Can Do In Mac Photos

The Mac Photos app has some deep functionality and even regular users may not know some of these tips. Learn how to search by photo contents, convert Live Photos to long exposure pictures, export contact sheet PDFs, adjust and filter videos, create multiple libraries and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some things that you may not know the Photos App, on your Mac, can do.
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Now the Photos App has evolved quite a bit over the years. There's a lot of deep functionality in there. In fact people that use the Photos App everyday may not know about some of these features. So let's start with a simple one. I'm often asked if there's a way to see titles or at least file names under each photo when doing them in the All Photos view. In fact you can. Go to View and then Metadata. You can see Titles right here. It even has a keyboard shortcut. Now when you turn that on what you'll see is either a title for a photo if one's been assigned. If no title has been assigned you'll see the file name instead. So for instance here you could see the file name. But if I click there I can actually edit the title and then you could see the title appears instead. Notice that the title is in black but files names are in grey. 
Now one of the coolest things that the Photos App does is it allows you to search your photos by the content of the photos. So, for instance, if you want to find photos that have boats in them you could just search for boat. The Photos App is actually smart enough to recognize objects. It's not going to be perfect but it will help you narrow things down. So, for instance, if you took a bunch of pictures at some docks you would be able to search for boat and then you could Control Click on it and choose Show In All Photos to jump to that photo and the ones around it. 
Another thing you could do is you could view Metadata such as which camera was actually used to take the photos. So for instance some of my earliest photos here, if I select and then do Command I or Click the information button here you could see in the Info Window it tells me this was taken with a C3030Z. I haven't had that camera for a long time. If I select other photos you could see this one was taken with the iPhone 7Plus. If I scroll down I could see this one was taken with my iPhone 10 and this one here was taken with my Rebel. 
When taking a picture with your iPhone it's going to take the GPS data and automatically assign a location to a photo. But most regular cameras don't have GPS. So if you look at the photo here, get Info about it, you'll see under location there's nothing. It won't show up on a Mac. But you could easily add a location. You don't even have to use a Mac to do it. You can just click here and type a location, leave it auto-complete. You can select it and then if you want you could actually use this map and drag it around, pickup the pin, and move that to any specific spot. 
Now there's a great set of editing tools in the Photos App. So you can double click on a photo to view it larger. Click Edit and you have all sorts of different ways to adjust, filter, and crop photos. In addition to that there's a button here that you can click and access extra editing tools included by third party apps that you may have added to your Mac. But you could also, before you go into Editing, choose Image and then Edit With and edit your photos in an external editor. So I'm going to use Pixelmator Pro. It will open up the image in Pixelmator Pro and I can make changes here. For instance let me do a color adjustment. Add a filter like that. Then I can Save. Once it's saved I could Close and you could see it is saved here. In Photos editing is non destructive. So I could always go into Edit and then Revert to Original if I want. 
Now I showed you how if you edit there's additional tools in here. One that you'll always see, even if you have nothing extra installed, is Markup. You could use the Markup Tools, the same ones that you find in Preview and Mail and other places, to do things like actually write text and draw shapes. Just do all sorts of different Markup in here. Save the changes and you could see that's now in the photo. So you can add captions, information, arrows, all sorts of things. You could always Revert to Original there as well. 
You can also Hide photos by selecting them and then you can go to Image and Hide Photo or you can select multiple ones and it would show Hide Multiple Photos there. You can use Command L for that. Now when you hide a photo it's going to hide it and put it in a special album that you can't usually see. But if you go to View, there's Show Hidden Photo Album and then you can click here to see which photos you've hidden. You can select those and easily unhide them using the same Command L shortcut. Hidden photos won't show up in searches and memories and all sorts of places like that. 
Now even if you know that you can adjust photos in the Photos App you may not know that you can fix imperfections as well. So you can go into a photo like this one, Edit and then use the Retouch Tool here to adjust the size of the Retouch Tool which is the size of the circle. We can zoom in here. Basically click and it will try to fix the imperfections there. The smaller the circle the more accurate you can get. 
Now you can Filter, Adjust the Colors and do other things with Photos. But what about videos. Apple actually added the ability to do all that with videos as well. They did it quietly pretty recently. So let's go to look at the videos here. Let's look at this video. If I Edit you could see I've got some of the same tools here adjusting light and color so I can increase the shadows in this, decrease the highlights, change the brightness, and do other things like run it through a filter, even Crop. When I click Done now the entire video has been edited. Every frame. Just like with pictures you can Revert to Original. 
Another special type of photo you've got is live photos. You may take a lot of live photos if you have that turned on by default on your iPhone. Live photos include a bit of video. They are actually taking many frames of photos and storing them in the same file. So you've got a photo like this, which shows live here, and you can see I can move my cursor over it and you could see the little bit of video there. If I go to Edit, I've got tools in here to be able to edit live photos. Most notably down here I've got four ways for the live photo to be shown. One it just shows the bit of video. Another one it loops. Another one it bounces back and forth. The most interesting one in a photo like this is long exposure where it uses all the different frames to create a long exposure for this image. Now it works great for this. It's actually not just overlaying each frame but it's adjusting it so if you're moving the camera a little bit, you don't have it on a tripod, it still going to overlay parts of the photo, like the rocks here, perfectly and then it's going to be able to make a long exposure of the water here. 
Now if you like animated GIFs then you may think that iPhotos have a lot in common with those. In fact you could export an animated GIF from Photos. You have to set the Live Photo to Loop. Once you've set it to loop, which works great in a photo like this, then you can go to File, Export, and Export GIF will show up. If this is greyed out that means either you're not looking at a live photo or if you are looking at a live photo you haven't set it to Loop.   
Another type of photo you may have is a portrait photo taken with the iPhone. So this has a foreground and a background. So when you go into a Portrait Photo you can go to Edit it. Under Adjust, at the top, you should see Portrait. You may have to expand this. You can set the Depth. So you can make the background be sharper or blurrier depending upon where you set this. Also you have the general controls here for what type of portrait it is. 
Now if you want to set a bunch of photos for somebody to review you could export a whole bunch of photos and send them this folder full of photos. But you could also create a Contact Sheet as a PDF. The way to do that is to select a whole bunch of photos, like this, and then go and pretend you're printing them. Now when you go to Print instead of choosing something like Fit or Fill as you would normally do to print a nice photo go to the bottom here and choose Contact Sheet and then you can adjust the number of columns, the margin, even click Captions here and change what's included with each photo. Then you could click Print and now instead of actually printing these out you could Save as a PDF, like this, and the PDF file could then easily be sent to somebody. They could even then mark it up and send you comments back. 
Now with the Photos App you could have multiple Photo Libraries. You don't just have to have one. If you go to Photos, Preferences under General you'll see your library location here and you could even click Show in Finder to see where it is. If you want to switch to another library you have to Quit Photos, then hold the Option Key down when you launch Photos. Then you get this special window here that allows you to choose a new library. It's going to look all over your internal drive and any other drives that are attached to find all of your Photo's Libraries. You could select anyone to open it. You could also click Create New to create a new Photos Library. 
Now you should be careful when using multiple Photo's Libraries. You should have a good reason to use the second one. You could only have one as your iCloud Photos Library. So most people are just going to have just one and use that for everything. But let's say you're an amateur photographer and somebody asks you to photograph a special event. Well you may not want to mix those photos with your photos. So this would be a good opportunity to create a separate library, put all those photos there, then you could go and do everything you do in Photos. Adjust them, add titles, create PDF's. Do whatever you want and keep those photos separate from your regular photo library. Other people may want to have a second photos library for photos that have to do with work. Like if you work in real estate or marketing and you want to keep those work photos separate from your regular iCloud photos library. 
Now I often hear that a problem with using the Photos App is that all of your photos have to be sucked into this Photos Library. You can't have them as separate files. That's just not true. You can go into Photos Preferences under General. There's a checkbox here for Copy Items to the Photos Library. If you have that Off you can drag and drop a file into the Photos App. It will add it to your Library and appear that it's there but the photo will remain attached to that external file that's saved wherever you want. So you can have a mixture of photos that are in your library and photos that are external file's to your library. Now note when you turn this Off you get this warning that these external photos won't be part of iCloud. So you won't see them on your iPhone or iPad or your second Mac. If you do use this and then decide you want those photos to be internal to the library you can actually select the photo and then go to File, Consolidate. What that does is it will Copy the photo into your library after the fact. The external file will still remain there but that's its own thing. The photo you see in your Photos App in your library that's now inside the Library. 
So there's a look at some of the features of the Mac Photos App in macOS Big Sur that you may not know about.

Comments: 16 Responses to “15 Things You May Not Know You Can Do In Mac Photos”

Joe

4 years ago

Gary,
I've been enjoying your tutorials for 10 years now, but this will be my first comment/question for you. I have an M1 Mini -OS 11.2.3 -Photos ver 6.0. But I don't have the editing tool for adjusting the background of portraits. I do have the lighting options at the bottom of edit mode. I often use the aperture control on my iPhone 11 to adjust the background. A web search didn't offer any clues why my background editing function is not an option. Any thoughts on why it is missing? Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Joe: Have you tried it on a variety of portrait photos, taken with your iPhone 11 and perhaps older iPhones? I noticed editing options missing from photos taken with older iPhones. There are probably other factors as well.

Joe

4 years ago

I checked portraits taken with the 7Plus, X, 11 and 11Pro. None of mine have the background adjustment or the other Portrait tweaks at the bottom either... perhaps that functionality is available with the 12 series? A reason to upgrade my 11 I suppose... I edit a lot in Photos so that feature is something I would really use, rather than adjusting the aperture while taking the photos on the fly, or using a Bokah app. Thanks again for all the insights you've provided. Keep up the great work!

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Joe: Definitely not just an iPhone 12 thing as the images I'm showing here are from the iPhone 11.

Russ Winkler

4 years ago

Hi Gary. If I create a new photos library, then how do I move some photos from the older library to the new library? Can this be done? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Russ: You would export from one library to files, then import into the other library. It isn't easy or clean, which is why you'd want to have a good reason to have multiple libraries. Also, only one library can be your iCloud one. So for the vast majority of people, they should have one library. But in some cases it makes sense. Like if you want a library to keep work photos separate, like if you are a real estate agent and take photos of houses for work, or you take an occasional gig photographing events that shouldn't be part of your personal photo library.

Georgette

4 years ago

Hi Gary,
Is there a way to backup your photos directly to an external drive? Such as in the procedure using Google Photos. Once a photo appears in Photos it is automatically entered in Google photos.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Georgette: Time Machine will back up the Photos on your drive just like it backs up everything else. Not sure what you have set up with Google Photos though.

Ellen

4 years ago

Thank you Gary from the bottom of my heart. That was the BEST ONE EVER (as far as I'm concerned). I have recently bought a new MacBook Air and you have answered so many of my questions. I am now floating on air.

Daniel Gourdellier

4 years ago

5. Edit with external app
I have the most recent version 6.0 of Photos.app
Now the button on the right of the Information button is no longer the extension button, but a share button.
With a right click on a photo, I have a "modify with..." item, and in the list of apps I see Preview.app and others, but I can't find "Markup" which was very convenient.
What's wrong ?
Thank you for your advice

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Daniel: It sounds like you are just viewing the photo, not editing it. Click the Edit button, then you'll see the ... button.

Daniel Gourdellier

4 years ago

Thank you Gary, I was wrong, no problem

Chuck

4 years ago

On iPhone SE 2020. Using Live Photo in portrait mode i tried to take a photo of flower and blur background. Could not find that option. Also a pop up box said
“No person detected”. I didn’t see this in your demo.
Your work is fantastic, thank you!

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Chuck: I don't think the SE has the cameras for that.

Bob Smailes

3 years ago

Nice & useful as always Gary. A question on keywords, is there a way of using keywords for a group of photos that have had keywords added in LightRoom in Photos without reapplying them in Photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Bob: Not sure as I don't use Lightroom so no way for me to experiment. That's all I would do: try things and see.

Comments Closed.

15 Things You May Not Know You Can Do In Mac Photos

Comments: 16 Responses to “15 Things You May Not Know You Can Do In Mac Photos”

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