How To Use Mac Photos Without Spending Any Time Organizing Anything

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.