Using Photos Memories On Your Mac

Your Photos app on your Mac will occasionally suggest groups of photos to view as Memories. You can view the photos in the Memory, or watch it as a slideshow. You can also save Memories and let Photos know if you'd like to see fewer memories like the one you are viewing.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at using Memories in the Mac Photos app.
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So in the Mac Photos app, on the left, you have an item here called Memories. You also may get Notifications from time to time that there's a new memory to checkout. So what are memories? Well, they are just collections of photos that are grouped together using the Photos' app artificial intelligence features. So it's basically looking for groups of photos that were taken at the same time, at the same place or perhaps with the same person or perhaps of the same person or there's some other thing linking those photos together. You'll often find groups of photos that were exactly a year or two or three or four years old or occasionally come up with other things like photos of a particular person or maybe pets or certain objects. So, for instance, here if I look in my sample Photos Library I could see it recently created a new memory called Year in Review which makes sense since we're at the beginning of a new year. 
Now to view a memory just double click it and you'll go into the memory and at the top here you're going to see one big image and it's basically going to play a silent slideshow for you here using kind of a Ken Burns effect to make things move around a bit. If you want this to go full screen you can click this button here and now it will take the memory into the full viewing area of Photos. Once you're in here you could move the cursor around and you see video playback controls here, though it's not really a video. It's playing a slideshow. I could Pause. I could change the volume on the music that's playing. I could also click here and change some things. Like for instance the theme being used which will effect the music and how the photos are displayed. Also you often have Short, Medium, and Long options here as to how many photos should be used in this video. Since there are only so many photos in this memory only Short and Medium are available for this one.
Now a lot of people ask if there's a way to export this slideshow here as a video. The answer is No, there's not. At least not on the Mac. I'll talk more about that in a minute. 
Now underneath the slideshow at the top you can scroll down and see a section called Photos. This will arrange a bunch of photos here for you to be able to look at. Of course you can go to anyone you want by double clicking on that photo. It goes into it just like you were reviewing in an album or in your library. You can use the arrow here to go back. You can also click Show More and it will change to a grid view and show all the photos in the memory. Switch to Show Summary to go back to this view. Underneath this you'll find people and it's going to show you people that are included in this memory. So you may see more than one. You can go into People View for that individual if you want. You'll also see Places and it will show on a map the different locations that are used here. So then you'll see related other memories and locations and albums that are related to this. 
Now at the bottom you'll see Controls. You can add to Favorite Memories. Now this is important if you want to keep the memory around. It's not going to keep all of your memories around. It's just going to have a few that are there and old ones are going to drop off the bottom as new ones are added to the top. So if there's a memory you really like you want to Add to Favorites and then you'll have this collection of favorites where this memory will stay there until you remove it. You can also delete this memory if you're done looking at it or you just don't want this memory to be around. You could also go to Suggest Fewer Memories Like This. So remember this one was suggesting a kind of year in review. So if I suggest show less like this then I'm probably not going to see a year in review next year. 
But there are other types of memories as well. For instance here's one called Four-Legged Friends. I'm bound to probably see this memory pop-up from time to time or maybe ones kind of related to it showing animals and pets and things. So if I said Show Fewer Like This I may not see memories that involve animals in the future. Now you can also do other things with the Share button here at the top. Notice that it says Share 16 Photos. So it's not sharing the memory. It's just sharing the list of photos that's in the memory. So I can add it as a Shared Album. I can email them. AirDrop them and do other things as well. I could also select the photos so maybe you show more to make sure I'm seeing all of them. Select the first one and then Shift Click to select the last one and then do New Album with Selection. Now I've created a new album that's a separate thing from that memory. But if you really like the memory you may decide to create an album to keep that group of photos around instead of leaving it as a memory. 
Now when you go to your list of memories you have memories in Favorite Memories. Remember I said you could save a memory as a Favorite Memory. So when you click on that you could see your Favorite Memories saved here. Remember to do that if you want to keep them around permanently.
A lot of people want to take this slideshow and save it out as a video so they can share it with others or keep it around. Unfortunately there's no way to do that in Photos on the Mac. But if you're using iCloud your Photos Library is going to sync across your devices and you actually can save the slideshow as a video if you're looking at it in iOS or iPad OS. On the Mac though it's easy to actually create a slideshow from photos. So you could go to your Photos here. I'll use Show More so I can select all of these. Then I could do File, and then Create, and then Slideshow and choose Photos as the slideshow maker. Now I can create my own slideshow using those photos. This will be very similar to the slideshow in Memories but you have a lot more control because you have the full set of slideshow controls. I've showed this in many videos before. You can create captions. You can rearrange the order of the photos. Set lots of different options for say the music and themes for the slideshow. This kind of slideshow you can export as a video. In fact another way to do that is here on the main Memories' screen you could Control Click, right click on a Mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad, and you have a lot of options here including to Create and then a Slideshow. So you can take just the images that were used in that actual slideshow and it will create a new slideshow from that. So you can see here it was just using 16 out of those 20 images here in the slideshow. But this is still a different slideshow and you could go through and customize this before you export it. This is also how you remove a memory from Favorites. You can do it here because this happens to be a memory saved in Favorites. But if you go to Favorites here you can also remove it or delete the memory right here. 
There are a couple of things in Photos, Preferences related to Memories. You have Show Holiday Events. So you can turn that off and you won't get memories associated with holidays. You also have Show Memories Notification. So if you turn that off you won't get Notifications anymore when a new memory is created. You also have Reset Suggested Memories. So this is when you click to suggest this type of memory less and you decide you've done that too much and you want to reset it. You can use this button to reset that and start over. 
So Memories isn't a feature that you necessarily need to use. As a matter of fact I suspect most people don't use it. It's just simply another way to view your photos. You could view them in the Library. You could create albums. You could view by people and places. You could use Memories to view your photos that way. Think of it like this. It's your own Photo Library suggesting to you groups of photos that you might enjoy looking at today. Compare that to other things like websites and social media that also demand your attention while you're using your computer. Viewing your own photos in Memories in the Photos app may actually be a better way to spend your time and a good way to get more enjoyment out of the photos that you've taken.
Comments: 6 Responses to “Using Photos Memories On Your Mac”

becky kurtz
4 years ago
Using Photos Memories On Your Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “Using Photos Memories On Your Mac”

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