Photos App Organization In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about how your Photos are organized in the Photos App with macOS Tahoe.

So it seems that every new version of macOS includes some small changes to how things are organized in the Photos App. Let's take a look at how it is done in macOS Tahoe. 

Here you've got the Photos App and the key thing to look at is the Library and Collections options here at the top left. Basically there are two different modes you can be in. You can view your entire library in one long list or you can view parts of your library in Collections. Let's start with Library selected here and you'll see that it's starts at the top left with your oldest photo and then you can scroll through all the way down to the bottom where you have your most recent photo. This represents your entire Library. You see each photo one time all in chronological order. Not everybody has a use for this and if you don't that fine. Then you'll only be interested in what's in Collections. But if you do want to look through your Library you can. You have lots of options here at the top. For instance, this button here will change each photo to fit perfectly within a square. So just cropping the preview you see here, not the actual photo of course, so that they all fit in a nice grid like this. You can click it again to go back to see each photo in its entirety. Also here in the Library you can use the Plus and Minus buttons here to Zoom In to have larger thumbnails here or Zoom Out to have smaller thumbnails but be able to see more. Then remember if you want to view a photo you just double-click on it and this takes you into the photo. You can view just that one photo and you have all the other controls here, like the ability to make edits and adjustments to the photo. Then use the little Back Button there to go back out to viewing all your photos. You can also click here and decide to Filter out some items.

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Now you also have the ability when viewing your Library to switch to Years or Months. So, basically you've got three levels. If you go to Years then you're going to see a square representing each year that you have a photo. Months will show each month that you have a photo. You can see the number of photos here. Also, photos goes back to that list. You can go to Years to quickly jump to something like let's jump into 2023 and then you'll see Months and let's jump into August and then you get to the All Photos level but you're now viewing August. So it is a quick way to move up to see an overview and then back down into the list of All Photos to see that specific month. 

Now let's switch to Collections. Collections are a way to view your photos but grouped together with some of the photos in each collection. So, here under Collections you can see I've got lots of different types of collections. I've got various Memories here. I've got Pinned Collections such as Favorites, Recently Saved. A Map view, Videos, Screenshots, and so on. I've got Albums. I've got people and pets. I've got Featured photos, Shared Albums,  and more. The idea here is each one of these Collections features some of your photos. It's important to realize that each of your photos is only in your Photo Library once. But it can appear in zero, one, or many of these collections. It's kind of like Playlists in the Music App. The songs are there only once but you can have a song in several different playlists if you like. 

So as you can see there are so many different kinds of collections. Not everybody is going to be interested in every kind of collection. At the top here we've got Memories. These are things that the Photos App automatically groups together for you. It recognizes that some photos have been taken around the same time in the same place and creates this thing called a memory. Then you can go into it, like this, and see the photos in that memory. It is just done automatically. You can see a summary like this or All and it puts all your photos in a grid. Then for any one photo you double-click it to go into that photo and you're just viewing that individual photo just like you would be if you double-clicked on the photo in the Library List. So you got Memories here. 

I'm going to skip down here to Albums and Albums and Memories are similar. The difference being that Memories are created automatically for you. Albums are created manually by you. So if you want to group some photos together or just collect some, like say the Favorites from a recent trip, you can do that in Albums. Note that each one of these sections here you can get into by just clicking on the name, like that, and you can see I'm only looking at Albums now. Here I can go into an individual album, like this one that I created, and you can create new albums by going to File, and New Album. Also if you select some photos in the Library, like I'll select this list here, I can go to File and New Album with Selection. But once you have an album you can see them in the left sidebar here and you could say drag a photo to that album to add to it. Then while you're in that album you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad on each individual photo and if you want you can remove that photo from the album. 

You can also rearrange the photos in one of your manually created albums. Put them in any order you like. Some people may not want to use Albums at all. Others may want to group all of their photos in individual albums based on events, or trips, or anything that you want. You can put photos in more than one album. So say if you took a picture of a flower on a trip. It can be in an album for that trip but also in an album of pictures of flowers that you've taken or if the flower happens to be purple you could put it in an album that has pictures of purple things. You can make albums for whatever you want and put whichever photos you want in each album. 

Now you have other kinds of Collections. For instance here in this section called Pinned, so you've got one called Favorites. This collection is anything that you've marked as a Favorite. So if I go back to my Library here and I scroll to the end and click the little heart there to mark it as a Favorite, go back into Collections and then look here you can see it has added that one. This is basically just showing me a list, like searching for all the photos that have been marked as a Favorite. This Collection here shows you a Map and you can move around and then zoom in on individual little collections here to see the photos on a map. This is a collection that just shows videos. This is one that just shows screenshots. I can get into people & pets right here, and so on. Pinned Collections is similar to other things you'll see down here. For instance you'll see people & pets here. You'll see under Media Types here, videos. You'll see under Utilities things like Favorites. So the idea here is that Pinned is just the things you want to see and use on a regular basis. But each one of these is also going to be represented further down here in some of these other types of Collections. 

So you can continue to go down this list here. If you click up here you can collapse All and basically turn this into a List of Different Collections. Then if you want to see the collection that are under that Category you can click here to Open it up, click here to Close it. You can also Show All. You can also Reorder. So, for instance, if I mainly use Albums I can move Albums up to the top here, like that, and now I'll see Albums up here. 

There are other sections here as well. For instance there's a single collection for Featured Photos. So this is another automatic thing like Memories. The Photos app is just going to pick out the photos that it thinks are your best ones. If you disagree you can just collapse this section and not use that. You see your Shared Albums separate from your regular albums. There's a section called Recent Days, so groups of photos by day. There's a section called Trips which basically tries to group your photos together in trips. So, by location and groups of days. In my sample Library here I use for demos it hasn't grouped any together like this. But in my regular Photo Library I actually have many trips here. It's kind of nice if you don't have time to organize your photos to have your trips put together like that. 

Then all the stuff down here, these are all other types of Collections. So you've got by Kind, like all your panoramas, all your portrait photos, or all your live photos altogether. You've got Utilities. Things like Recently Deleted, Duplicate Photos, you may actually see more here, because my sample library only has less than 700 photos. So not all of the things that are under Utilities will be present here. But for anyone of these you want to see it in a better way than having to go all the way down to the bottom here, you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it and Pin it. This means it now appears here under Pinned. So you can see I added illustrations to this. But I could also Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on an item and Unpin it. So, pick out the things from Media Types and Utilities that you want to see in the Pinned Section and add them there. Then if these are the main things you want to see you may also want to Reorder and move Pinned to the top, even above Albums. 

Now the other place to see a lot of these is the left sidebar here. You'll notice that the left sidebar is a lot like a list of Collections. You've got things like your Pinned Section and you can open this up and see the Pinned items here in the same order. You've got your Albums listed here as well. So use the left sidebar as a quick way to get into a Collection without having to view all the Collections like that. 

So what Collections in the Photos App really does is allow you to choose your level of organization. You can choose not to organize anything. Don't create any Album and simply use the Memories, the Trips, the Days, and other things to automatically group your photos together and view them like that. Or just view them in Chronological order in the Library. Or you can choose to highly organize your Photos by creating as many Albums as you want and putting the photos in those various albums. The idea here is that very few people are going to use all of this. You choose what you want to do. You may want to just view your Library in Chronological order and that's fine. You may want to only create Albums and only view your photos in albums. That's fine too. Or you may want to use the Automatic Collections to view your photos or any combination of those. Whichever you want to do is fine. The Photos App gives you all of these options to choose from. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.