5/14/20
9:00 am

How To Use Mac Photos Without Spending Any Time Organizing Anything

The Photos app includes tools like albums and tags to help you organize your photo library. But if you like, you can skip that and just use built-in features that automatically group your photos by dates, locations, people or objects.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you the easiest way to organize the photos in your Photos app by doing absolutely nothing.
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So I get asked a lot of questions about how to best organize the photos in your Photos Library. I've used many different methods myself. But recently I've been doing it the easiest way possible by doing absolutely nothing. I've gotten rid of all of my albums and I just don't use Albums or anything else anymore. I don't Tag. I don't do any other kind of organization. Instead I just use the built-in viewing functions in Photos to find the photos I want and I find it works pretty well.
So at the top of the Photos Library you've got Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. Now starting with Years this kind of looks like how I used to organize my photos before digital photos. I would have a photo album for a year. So having a square here that shows me 2014 and being able to dig down into that is pretty much exactly what I want to see. As a matter of fact I used to create folders for albums with the year name. So I would have a folder called 2014 and inside that I would have different events in albums. So now I have each year here which makes a really good starting place.
But I could also go to Months. This breaks it down, instead of just by year but each month. So here is June, here's July. It kind of makes sense and it's really easy to find what you want. I can usually remember what month it was that I took a trip of did something and go to that photo. Now you can go further down into Days. What it's going to do then is it's going to give you groups of days together. It's going to look at the locations of photos taken. Also kind of clusters of photos in time and it's going to group them together. For instance here July 2 to July 11 when I was in Hawaii during that group of days all basically at the same location. 
It groups them together and it shows me the featured photos from here. If I want to see all the photos from here it's pretty easy. All I need to do is click on All Photos. Watch what will happen. You could see that the main photo there actually shrunk over to here and now I have a list of all my photos. All Photos is just a big list from your first photo to your last photo. So being able to go from days and a few that represent that group of days kind of like if you had a cover on an album. This is all it is for. It's not meant to be like here are the photos from that day. It's basically to give you an idea. Okay, I recognize these photos. Now I can dig down into them.
So it's easy to go into All Photos and now see a grid view of everything starting with the photos from that group of days. You can also go backwards from this. So if I scroll down to some point later in time, and you could see here I'm in 2017. If I click on days it will actually go back to the same point in time as the photos shown here. The same thing for months as well.
So think of Years, Months, and Days as ways to get into viewing all of the photos in your album. Once you narrow it down by one of those and click on All Photos now you get down to the level where you're actually looking at the photos in your photo album and you can scroll through them. Now all that I get with no effort at all. It's taking the date and time from the photos themselves and it's grouping them altogether without me having to spend any time when I bring the photos in to organize them.
Now I can also view by places. If I click on Places then I get a world map and I can look through these and see where I took photos. Of course this only applies to photos you took with a camera that has GPS in it. Although it's easy actually to find other photos. If I take some photos with a camera without a GPS and some photos with my iPhone they're taken at the same time. So I can easily find those. For instance, let's go and look at the photos here in Scotland. I can double click and it will actually zoom in a little more and if I double click even more and it will break things apart. I can use the trackpad to zoom out or in. The same thing with the Magic Mouse. 
If I click and hold and then release it actually takes me down into that place and shows me more photos. Now if I want to find more photos taken at the same time I could select any one, go to File, and select Show in All Photos. Now it will show me that photo and all the other photos that were taken at the same time. This is just the big list of All Photos. So this photo, which doesn't have GPS data, I can easily find because this one did. Also you don't need to use the map to do location stuff. You can go and search by name up here and it will give you the results there. Then you could do the same thing here. I can click on this photo. Then I could go to Show in All Photos if I want and see photos taken at the same time.
Another thing you could do is to go to People. Then you'll see the faces from your collection and you can go and select more. Sometimes they will have a little question up there asking if you want to identify some more so you can do them in small groups. Other times you can go into an individual, like that. Then go to the bottom and you could see Confirm Additional Photos. When you're looking at these it's going to basically show you like an album cover. But you can click Show More and it will show you all of the photos. You could do the same thing here as before. If you find something and you want to find other photos around that same time you can select it, go to File, and then Show in All Photos. It will jump to that spot in All Photos. You could also search for people like that. 
Now another thing you could do is search for Objects. So you can type something in here like, for instance, if I remember there's a picture of a waterfall that I took I can search and I can find these waterfall photos. If I remember I took pictures of some roses I can search for that. You know I can select that photo and do the Show in All Photos to find other photos that I took at the same time. So searching for objects isn't perfect. But a lot of times it will help you find the photo that you want and you didn't have to setup anything in advance. You didn't have to Tag that photo or put it in an album.
You can actually do the same thing for dates here as well. So I can search for July 2014 and I can see results there. So instead of digging down into Photos and then going to Months and scrolling through a long list I can just do a quick search for that.
Now if you like the idea of organizing your photos and you like the idea of creating albums then by all means go ahead and do that. But if you rather just dump all your photos into the Photos app and then find what you want later on you'll find that it works really well if you don't do anything up front and just use these features in the Photos app to find the photos you need. It works basically the same between the Mac Photos app and iOS as well.

Comments: 23 Responses to “How To Use Mac Photos Without Spending Any Time Organizing Anything”

Danny S.

5 years ago

Is there any way of changing the "key" photo that appears in your Years or Months view? For example, does the first photo in the 2019 album the one with the earliest date in 2019? Thanks!

Steve Mishket

5 years ago

Gary, Thanks for the tip re organizing my photos. Since I already have some albums set up… Can I just delete the albums? I presume all of the photos will stay in the photo master file.
Steve Mishket

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Danny: Nope. So it is important to NOT think of them a a photo that "defines" the year or month. Just think of them as a visual indicator for you to use to locate the correct group of photos.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Steve: You can. But it doesn't hurt to keep them either. No reason to delete them. Maybe try not to use them for a while and if you find you didn't feel the need to ever use them, then you know you can just abandon them.

dan pawlak

5 years ago

I s this procedure only for the latest VERSION OF MAC OS

dan pawlak

5 years ago

Sorry to say, I am an old man with an old MAC
Pro running 10.11.6

Jack Robertson

5 years ago

Thanks, Gary - Is there a way to add the location to those photos that were taken with a camera with no GPS?

Donald G. James

5 years ago

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere - please just provide link if so. What I am not sure of is how to caption my photos. Where is that done? I noticed most of your photos are some version of "img_1234.jpg" I not only want to change that to what the photo is, but I really want to add a 1-2 sentence caption that hopefully is searchable. For example, my decease mother's name is "Muriel" and when I search her name I get some photos of her but not all. Thanks

Donald G. James

5 years ago

Apologies - per my recent question. A simple google search answered my question. I understand how to caption now. Key is the info button.

5 years ago

Really great Gary, thanks. I've been annoyed with myself for ages for not tagging photo's and not building albums to make finding things easy. This looks just as good without all that tedious typing and dragging. Really appreciate having my eyes opened to this. Best wishes.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

dan: Yes, you need the latest version of macOS to have this version of Photos.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Jack: Yes. Select a photo, use Command+i to bring up Info. Click Assign a Location.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Donald: Sounds like you mean titles? But I would instead use keywords for that. And for people, I would use the People section of Photos. You can go into each person and approve more photos for that person. I have videos on keyword tagging and People if you search for them.

Bill Nice

5 years ago

I have several Photo libraries. Any way to consolidate them to use your suggestion.

Also is Duplicate Photo Finder safe to use. I have many duplicates but afraid to use the Duplicate Finder as I would hate to lose my photos,

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Bill: No good way to consolidate other than to export the photos from the libraries you don't want to use anymore and import them into the main library. As for that app, I avoid those apps for precisely that reason. I don't want an app deciding which of my precious photos to keep and which to delete. I just do a "spring cleaning" once in a while. Takes time, but I ENJOY looking at my photos, so it is not something I mind.

Rob H

5 years ago

Great video Gary, as usual, very helpful. thanks.

Karl

5 years ago

Gary, another great video, I learned something new. Looks like you’ve been to some beautiful places.

gene

5 years ago

Good video. I had a handful of pictures of an electric meter over a couple of years. The Photos app was not able to find them all of them. Any insights as to what I can do to remedy this?

Wade

5 years ago

This is one of the best yet, and you've got a lot of good ones. I've been "procrastinating" for a long time on organizing my 18,000+ photos. Your training will help me a bunch, just by letting me know how to find things.

Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Gene: There are a lot of objects that Photos will recognize, but I guess that isn't one of them. I'd search by date until you find them. Then add a keyword to those photos so you can find them again.

Jason Gold

5 years ago

Gary, thanks. I use the powerful search feature mostly for finding people. We will go out to dinner with friends and I will quickly find photos of them from years earlier by just typing in the names. Of course I had to previously name their faces on a least one or two photos. But as you point out, Photos scans and finds the same faces in the entire collection. A great future topic would be to explore all the aspects of the Photos facial recognition feature - it has evolved over the years.

Barb

5 years ago

Gary, any suggestions what to do if mac Photos doesn't 'update' people list (doesn't add names to photos of people?) I usually search by people, but photos is not doing a good job at all at keeping them current; I have to manually do it.

Gary Rosenzweig

5 years ago

Barb: Are you giving your Mac time to do things in the background? For instance, if you boot up, use it, then shut it down right away, you aren't letting it perform maintenance tasks like this. Just let it sleep. Not sure if that will help this particular thing.

Comments Closed.

How To Use Mac Photos Without Spending Any Time Organizing Anything

Comments: 23 Responses to “How To Use Mac Photos Without Spending Any Time Organizing Anything”

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