The Surprisingly Robust Photos Import Feature

When you import photos from a camera or card into the Mac Photos app, you can choose to skip duplicates and place photos directly into an album. But you can also use this powerful feature when just importing files as well.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you the surprisingly useful import feature in the Photos App on your Mac.
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Now if you use the Photos App on your Mac you're probably familiar with the Import feature. This how you import photos from your camera, from a SD card, how you can directly import photos from your iPhone is you're not using iCloud. But it actually does a lot more than just bringing in photos. Even if you think you know everything about using Import in Photos you may not know one of the last things I'm going to show you about how to import files using it.
So in the Photos App if you want to import photos you don't have to do any special menu or anything like that. You can just insert your SD card into your SD card reader. Plug that into USB or connect with your camera and  the import screen will come right up. So here you can see it appears and I see the actual device here under Devices, in this case it's from a Cannon camera. It could be the camera itself or it could just be the SD card. Now you have the import screen and here you can just skip all the functionality here, click Import All New Photos, and you're done. But note a few things. 
First of all note the checkbox up here. If that's checked every time you plug in the camera or SD card it will automatically launch Photos. If you don't want that to happen make sure that's not checked. Then see how it's trying to help you not have duplicate photos in your Library. At the top here you'll see Already Imported Photos. Then under that you'll see New Photos. So it knows what photos are already in your Library. As a matter of fact it will only import the new photos. But if you really want to reimport a photo you already have you can select it like that and you could see now it will allow you to import that selected one. Now if you don't want to import all of your photos you don't have to. You can click to select any photo and it will come up with Import and Selected Photos.  So you can just import some and not others. As a matter of fact this screen here can just be used to Review your photos. You have Zoom amount here. You can zoom in a little bit and you can see your photos there and decide which ones you want to keep and which ones you don't and select Import. Now this checkbox here allows you to Delete the imported items afterwards. So if you just want to import some photos right now but not all of them you can select this. It will delete them from the card or camera but it will leave the ones that you haven't imported.
Then you also have this pull-down menu here which allows you to import them directly to an Album. So by default it just imports them to your Library. So it doesn't put them in any album. But if you select it you can see that you can select an existing album even if you have your albums in folders. So you can have these photos put directly into an album. So every photo, of course, is imported into your Library. But you can also have them assigned directly to an album this way. You could also select New Album and it will create a new album right here. 
Now you can also use this as a way to get photos from your iPhone to your Photos Library. If you're using iCloud Photos, of course, this is automatic. But if you're not you can just connect your iPhone like it's a camera. You'll see it appear under Devices and you could see you can have multiple devices connected at the same time. You have all the same options here just as if your iPhone was a regular camera or SD card. It will even show you the duplicates all the way at the top of the list. You could select the photos that you want and import them. But you're not going to see the option to delete them here probably because I'm using iCloud Photos. 
So here's something else you can use the Import function for. You can use it to import files. Now you may think you know how to import files into the Photos App. You can just take a photo, like this one, and drag and drop it right in here to the main body. You can drag and drop it to Library and that will instantly import it in. Simple. But instead of  doing that you can go to File Import and then you can select the photos. You can either select all of them here. I'm going to Shift click to select all of them or you can select a folder full of images and then click Review for Import. Then it treats those files like they are on a SD card or on a camera. So you can see here, for instance, it identifies one as already in my Library so I can avoid having a duplicate of that or I can select the individual photos here. You could see it even lists the folder here as a device. As a matter of fact click Cancel then it goes away from devices. 
Now what happens if I had these organized so they are inside of folders already. Then it does something really cool. If I do File, Import and then select that folder, and remember it has got those two subfolders in it, I can do Review for Import and it will take all the photos and all the subfolders. But if I check Keep Folder Organization it's actually going to create albums based on those folders. So now I can import these new photos and then if I look under Albums I can see it actually has created a folder called Pics because that's the New Folder and under that it has created Old Photos and Summer Trip. So if you have your photos already organized into folders you can import those folders into Photos this way and it will create albums for each folder. 
So next time you need to Import a bunch of files into your Photos Library instead of dragging and dropping them in use File, Import and then get all of these options. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “The Surprisingly Robust Photos Import Feature”

Ed Adams

3 days ago

Actually, in my opinion, this is one of the weakest functions in Photo. It doesn’t allow you to add or change EXIF, add keywords, correct time and location, etc. Every other post Data Asset Management application has these features.

Radha

8 hours ago

Actually, Photos on a Mac is not my favourite.
Hi Gary, Can you please do a video on how to EXPORT All my photos from my Mac on all the various libraries this software seems to have created?
That would be really useful.

The Surprisingly Robust Photos Import Feature

Comments: 3 Responses to “The Surprisingly Robust Photos Import Feature”

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