Why You Should Stop Storing Photos as Files and Use Mac Photos Instead

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you why you are missing out if you are storing your photos as files instead of in your Photos Library.

Now sometimes I hear from people that are storing their photos as files in regular folders with the Finder instead of putting them in the Photos app. Often this is because they don't understand the benefit of having your photos in your Photos Library and access to the Photos App. So here's an overview of what you are missing out on if you're not using Photos App. 

In the Photos App you can easily view your photos as you can see here. You can zoom in or zoom out to have them be smaller thumbnails or larger images or for each individual one you can double-click and go and view it pretty much full screen. You can also filter which photos are shown and view them in different ways. I can view them instead by months with days underneath that, skipping months where I haven't taken any photos. I can also go to Years and in years I can very quickly dig down into a year and then see the months inside that year and then dig down to a particular day and just go to All Photos and scroll through them. 

It is also very easy to see a subset of your photos just by Searching. You can search for dates, like this. You can search for places, like this. You can even search for objects, like this and just see those objects. I didn't have to do anything in advance to indicate that these photos were all birds. My App just looked at the photos and figured that out on its own and it does that for thousands of different object types. You can also view a map and see all of your photos grouped together on a map in different ways. It also will organize things by people and pets. Since this is my sample library I just have photos of myself in it but normally you would see of your family and friends here. It's only a little bit of work to setup and then from that point on it will recognize people and pets in your photos automatically. Then you can combine all of these in searches. 

So, for instance, I can search for photos of myself but also in a specific location, like this. You can search for photos where there are two or more people in them that you know or at things like dates and objects in here as well. 

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If you like organizing your photos you can. You can select a bunch of photos here and you can create a New Album with those photos. You can create as many albums as you want. Right now it doesn't duplicate a photo. Each album just links to different photos. Your photo is there just once. So you can have lots of different albums and have the same photo in more than one album. Kind of like a playlist in the Music App. But that's not the only way you can organize. You can also tag photos with Keywords. So for this photo right here I can add different keywords. You can have all sorts of different keywords that you customize and define here and then you can apply them to different photos and use those keywords in Searches. You can also add titles and descriptions or captions for each photo if you like and searches will turn up photos that match the words in those. 

Now if you don't want to organize with albums and keywords you don't have to. You can just use those Months and Years there and things like Days and Trips and other things like different media types where you can see, say, all of your selfies. Or utilities  where you can see things like receipts or anything that contains handwriting in it. Let photos figure out for you how to organize things if you like or ignore those features and only do your own organization with albums and keywords. It's up to you. 

Now one of the most powerful parts of the Photos App that you don't get with the Finder is the ability to work with your photos. If you go into an individual photo, like this one, you can click the Edit button here. Now you've got a whole bunch of different adjustments here on the right. So you can adjust, for instance, light and you can get as detailed as you want. You can adjust color. You can adjust all sorts of other things like where to balance curves, levels, definition, or you can just go to Filters here and then choose one of these filters to easily change your photo. You also have a set of Cropping Tools that allows you also to straighten or rotate the photo, change perspective, flip. You can set the cropping to a specific ratio or have it be freeform so you can adjust as you like and move it around, zoom in, zoom out, and crop it to get it just like your want.  On newer Macs you'll have an AI tool, Cleanup, to get rid of blemishes from photos. On older Macs you have a Retouch Tool under Adjustments. 

The important thing to know about all of these tools is you always can revert to the original. Photos is non-destructive. It saves your original photo no matter what. All these adjustments are applied on top of that. You can just leave it adjusted in your Photos Library so that's how you see it. But any time you want you can use Revert To Original to go back to the original photo. So you never permanently change a photo. You can make adjustments and export it, if you like, and then go back. Or make the adjustments and just always see it from that point on with those adjustments in your library. It's up to you. 

You can even do most of these things with videos. You can store videos as well as photos in your Photos Library. You can Edit there as well. You can adjust, say, color for the entire video. You can trim the video as well taking out a little bit from the beginning and end. You are not locked in to just those tools. When you are in Edit you've got this button up here. So third party apps can add more tools that work directly inside of photos. Plus you'll notice some of these tools just allow you to edit the photo in an external editor. You don't even need to use this here. Before you go to edit you can have an image selected like this and then go to Image and then Edit With. Then you can edit it with any image editing tool even if it doesn't directly support Photos. So, for instance, I can choose Pixelmator Pro right here and I can edit it in Pixelmator Pro. Let's change the exposure amount, for instance, just so you can see a difference. I'm going to Save and then exit out of Pixelmator Pro and you can see the change has been applied here in my Photos Library. But just like with any other edit I can always revert to the original. 

You can also make adjustments to the metadata in Photos. So, for instance, if this photo had, say, the wrong time because I forgot to set the times on my camera or something, I can go to Image and adjust Date & Time and change it here. If I had selected many photos and say I just did the time by 3 hours, it would adjust all of those photos by 3 hours. You can also change the location of a photo by looking at the Info Window for it and you can go into the little map here and grab the pin and place it somewhere else or simply type a new location here. If you took a bunch of photos in the same location you can go here and copy the location and then assign that location to other photos you select. 

But perhaps the best feature of using the Photos App is the iCloud Photos Library. So in your settings here if you go to iCloud you can select Have iCloud Photos Turned On. If you have two Macs you can see your photos across those two Macs. If you have an iPad or an iPhone you'll see your photos there as well. You can choose whether to have all of your photos always stored locally on this Mac or use iCloud Photos to optimize and save local storage space. It's the same thing as using iCloud Drive with the Optimize feature turned On. It's your choice which one you want to use. The best thing about this is it means all your photos are with you all the time. They are not just sitting on your Mac, on your desk, at home. They're in your pocket. You see the same photos here. They stay in sync automatically with no extra effort from you. As a matter of fact if you take a photo with your iPhone it will save to your Photos Library here and then automatically sync to your Mac. So you can be halfway around the world, take a photo with your iPhone, and the photo will arrive seconds later on your Mac at home! It's just not convenient. It could really save you if you're on vacation and you take some photos and you loose your phone or camera. You can even use an SD card reader and load photos from your regular camera onto your iPhone and then they'll sync and end up back home on your Mac while you're still traveling. 

iCloud also allows you to easily create Shared Albums, like this one. You can select some photos creating a New Shared Album from them and they can be private only allowing specific other people with iCloud Accounts to view them or completely public allowing anybody with a link to view them. They'll see any updates that you apply. So you can be on vacation and keep adding photos to a Shared Album as you go and people can keep checking back to see your new photos there. There's even a feature called Shared Library that allows you to have photos defined as either your personal photo or shared with your family group. So say you and your spouse or your extended family and then everybody can use that Shared Library to share photos rather than having to send copies of them back and forth to each other. 

Here's some more features that you only get if you are storing your photos in the Photos App, not as files in the Finder. Special types of photos like live photos can be viewed here and you can go in and view the live photo but you can also edit and then choose a new key frame for the live photo. Also set whether it loops, bounces, is seen as a long exposure. For portrait photos taken with an iPhone you can adjust the portrait photo depth here to blur the background. For bursts you can make a selection and see all of the different photos that are part of that burst and select the one that you want to keep. Note that the Photos app also handles most raw formats as well allowing you to take the raw photos from your camera. You can view them here in Photos and you can use the Editing Tools to develop them by setting all of the properties here. 

Now one of the reasons some people don't want to use the Photos App is they feel that their photos are locked into the Library and they can't access the files. But you can easily export the photos anytime you want. You can select one or more photos and go to File Export and you can export the unmodified original getting the original file back exactly as it came from your camera. Or you can use the regular export and export in a variety of different formats, quality levels, sizes, and you can decide whether or not location and other information is included in the export. If you want to make those more private and you even have different ways to name those files and have them separated into folders. Plus for simple exports you can always just Drag & Drop out into the Finder or into another app, like Mail or Messages, or Pages, or whatever you are using. So it is super easy to get to your photos.

Plus you do have a lot of options for how you import photos in. For instance, you can decide to leave your photos as files external to the Photos Library and only have them referenced by using this option here. The downside is those photos then won't be available in iCloud. But you can do them for some photos and not for others. You can also have multiple Photo Libraries. Not something I recommend for most people. But there are some special uses for this if you want to have separate libraries for certain special things. 

There's a lot more that I just don't have time to cover. For instance you can create a slideshow from photos and export that as a video. There's also a feature called Visual Lookup, which when you have a photo like this and you see the Info Button has changed to show you something like, for instance, a bird symbol here, I can click on it and it shows me that it has identified two birds in this photo. I can click there and it will give me information about the birds. It works for landmarks as well. 

If you're still hesitant remember you can give it a try without committing to anything. Just maybe add a bunch of photos, say from a recent trip to the Photos App and play around with them. You don't have to remove the files from wherever they are located to do that. Then you can play around with the Photos App. Try iCloud Photos. See what it is like to easily have your photos sync from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa. Play around with the adjustment tools, the external editors and all of that. I think you'll find that there are so many advantages to having your photos stored in the Photos Library that it just makes sense for pretty much everybody. Hope you found this useful Thanks for watching.