Take Control of Photos [2 ed.] 9781947282292

Citation preview

EBOOK EXTRAS: v1.0

Downloads, Updates, Feedback

PHOTOS TAKE CONTROL OF

s ’ e l p p A r e t s a M Photos app S O i & c a M for

by JASON SNELL $14.99

Table of Contents Read Me First ............................................................... 5

Updates and More ............................................................. 5

Basics .............................................................................. 6

Introduction ................................................................ 7

Photos Quick Start ....................................................... 8

What’s New in Photos ................................................ 10

Changes in Photos for iOS ................................................ 10

Changes in Photos for Mac ................................................ 10

Switch from iPhoto .................................................... 11

Import from iPhoto into Photos .......................................... 11

What Happens Behind the Scenes ...................................... 13

Take Stock of the Changes ................................................ 14

Import Your Files into Photos .................................... 17

Import from a Camera ..................................................... 18

Manage Files Yourself ....................................................... 22

Import to iOS ................................................................. 23

Weigh New Formats vs. Compatibility ................................. 26

Choose Raw, JPEG, or Both ............................................... 27

Manage Multiple Photos Libraries .............................. 29

Add a New Library ........................................................... 29

Switch Between Libraries .................................................. 30

Merge Your Photos Libraries .............................................. 31

Repair a Bad Library ........................................................ 32

Understand the System Photo Library ................................ 32

Use Photo Libraries on External Drives ............................... 33

Back Up Your Photos ........................................................ 34

Navigate the Photos Interface ................................... 37

Browse Your Library ......................................................... 38

Explore Other Sections in the Sidebar ................................ 43

2

Use the Info Window ........................................................ 43

Interact With Live Photos .................................................. 46

Navigate Photos for iOS ................................................... 49

Manage Your Photos .................................................. 53

Play Favorites ................................................................. 53

Organize with Keywords ................................................... 55

Hide Photos from View ..................................................... 57

Delete Photos ................................................................. 58

Find and Name People ............................................... 59

Find All Photos for a Person .............................................. 59

Name and Merge People ................................................... 60

See People in iOS ............................................................ 63

Use Search to Find Your Photos ................................. 65

The Search Box Is Your Friend ........................................... 65

Harness the Power of Categories ....................................... 68

Find Photos by Location .................................................... 70

Unearth Old Photos ................................................... 73

What’s In a Memory? ....................................................... 74

Take Control of Memories ................................................. 75

Edit a Memory Video ........................................................ 75

Make Albums in Photos .............................................. 78

Find Your Albums ............................................................ 78

Make a New Album .......................................................... 79

Add Photos to an Album ................................................... 79

Organize Your Albums ...................................................... 80

Use Albums in Photos for iOS ............................................ 81

Define Smart Albums ....................................................... 83

Sync with iCloud Using Photos ................................... 89

Set a System Photo Library ............................................... 90

Get that Syncing Feeling .................................................. 93

Make Quick Photo Fixes ............................................. 96

Edit Without Editing ......................................................... 96

Make Quick Fixes in Edit Mode ........................................... 97

3

Process Photos in iOS ..................................................... 102

Make Edits to Your Photos ....................................... 105

Adjust Your Photos ......................................................... 106

Remove Blemishes and Dust ........................................... 108

Remove Color Casts ....................................................... 109

Copy and Paste Adjustments ........................................... 110

Add Adjustments in iOS .................................................. 111

Edit Live Photos ............................................................. 112

Edit Outside of Photos for macOS ..................................... 114

Share Your Photos ................................................... 117

Use the Share Menu ....................................................... 117

Try Drag and Drop Image Sharing .................................... 119

Share Multiple Photos ..................................................... 119

Export and Resize Images ............................................... 120

Share Using iCloud ........................................................ 121

Share from iOS ............................................................. 124

View Photos on Apple TV ......................................... 130

Scroll Through Photos .................................................... 130

Make Slideshows in Photos ...................................... 134

Create a Slideshow ........................................................ 134

Play in Photos ............................................................... 138

Save a Slideshow as a Video ........................................... 139

Make Slideshows in iOS .................................................. 140

Build Books and Calendars ...................................... 143

Design Books with Mimeo and Motif ................................. 143

Make a Calendar ............................................................ 150

Order Prints and Cards ................................................... 151

About This Book ...................................................... 153

Ebook Extras ................................................................. 153

About the Author ........................................................... 154

About the Publisher ........................................................ 155

Copyright and Fine Print .......................................... 156

4

Read Me First This ebook was published in November 2018 by alt concepts inc. It was written by Jason Snell and edited by Scholle McFarland. This book helps you get started with Apple’s Photos app for macOS and iOS. It focuses on importing libraries from older apps, managing your media inside Photos, and using Photos to edit and share your media with friends, relatives, and the world at large. Take Control of Photos, version 1.0 Copyright © 2018, The Incomparable Inc. All rights reserved.

Updates and More

You can access extras related to this ebook on the web (use the link in Ebook Extras, near the end; it’s available only to purchasers). On the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy any subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.) • Read the ebook’s blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview. If you bought this ebook from the Take Control website, it has been added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually; see Ebook Extras.

5

Basics

To review background information that might help you understand this book better, such as finding System Preferences and working with files in the Finder, I recommend reading Tonya Engst’s ebook Take Control of Mac Basics.

6

Introduction In 2002, Apple introduced iPhoto as a way for us to save our photos on our Macs inside a “digital shoebox.” At the time, I’d owned a digital camera for three months, and had only a few hundred digital images. Over the years, as my photo library grew, Apple revised iPhoto, always trying to stay in front of the onslaught of thousands of digital photos accumulated over a lifetime—at least the lifetime of my two children. By 2014, enough was more than enough. Apple decided it needed to start from scratch and ditch iPhoto and replace it with a single application, which would be called—in the prosaic style favored by Apple for its iOS apps—Photos. This would allow Apple to unify (more or less) the photography apps it was creating for both macOS and iOS. In this book, I’ll describe how to perform essential tasks with Photos— in both macOS and iOS. Apple deploys some of the most powerful functionality it has developed—including its iCloud servers and its machine-learning technology—in the service of making your photo library more accessible and discoverable. My daughter, whose birth was the motivator for my very first digitalcamera purchase, is about to graduate from high school. Her entire life has been chronicled with digital photos—tens of thousands of them at this point. That catalog, which spent time in several photography apps including iPhoto, now resides in my iCloud Photos, accessed via Photos on macOS and iOS. Photography is how we preserve the images of our lives; it’s important that we understand the software that allows us to organize, view, and share those images. That’s what you’ll learn with this book. The version of the book you are reading has been updated to reflect the changes in Photos version 4.0, which was released along with macOS 10.13 Mojave and iOS 12 in September 2018. You can find an overview of the changes by reading What’s New in Photos. Thanks for joining me on this journey. Let’s get started! 7

Photos Quick Start This book explores Apple’s Photos app (in both macOS and iOS) by walking you through the most essential photo-management and editing tasks. You can read the chapters in any order. Click any link to jump to a topic. Find out what’s new: • Discover what you have to look forward to with Photos in 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12 in What’s New in Photos. • If you’re just now switching to Photos from Apple’s venerable iPhoto app, you can get a rundown of the differences in Switch from iPhoto. Import and manage photos: • Photos for macOS and iOS can import files directly from your camera or memory card. Read Import Your Files into Photos. • You can switch between libraries to keep collections separate. See Manage Multiple Photos Libraries. Get organized: • Apple includes machine-learning technology in Photos that allows the app to identify objects, animals, and faces. Read Use Search to Find Your Photos to take advantage of this exciting feature. • Want to quickly round up all the photos of your kids taken with your DSLR within the last year? Take advantage of your valuable metadata in Define Smart Albums. Perfect your photos: • Give photos a little extra “pop” in macOS or iOS by cropping, applying filters, and fixing red-eye and rotation problems. See Make Quick Photo Fixes. • Learn how to Make Edits to Your Photos by removing unwanted details and applying adjustments, as well as editing with external apps like Photoshop if you prefer. 8

Explore your collection: • Remember Christmas 3 years ago? Photos does. Peruse Photosgenerated collections of your photos, including a map of locations, associated people, and (in Photos for iOS) a customizable movie. Check out Unearth Old Photos for much more. • Get a handle on how Apple automatically identifies the people in your photos, as well as how to put names to faces in Find and Name People. Connect with other devices: • Thanks to the cloud, you can access your entire Photos library from any device you own. But you’ll need to change the way you think about managing your photos to make it work. Read Sync with iCloud Using Photos. • Admire your favorite photos on your big-screen TV when you View Photos on Apple TV. Show off your photos: • Don’t let your photos stay locked up on your Mac. Learn the easiest ways to Share Your Photos with others using social media and more. • If your desired method of sharing your photos involves getting them out of Photos, try Export and Resize Images. • Turn a special event’s photos into a beautiful movie with its own soundtrack. See Make Slideshows in Photos. • For all the convenience of digital photos, there’s still nothing quite like holding an image of loved ones in your hands. Discover how to use new third-party extension apps to design printed calendars and books. See Build Books and Calendars.

9

What’s New in Photos In macOS Mojave and iOS 12, Photos has grown and changed. Here are the highlights of the biggest changes in the new versions of Photos.

Changes in Photos for iOS

Apple actually made some nice changes to Photos in iOS 12, revamping parts of its interface and upgrading search features: • In iOS, Photos has gained the capability to search for multiple items at once, which makes it much easier to zero in on exactly the photo you’re looking for. See Use Search to Find Your Photos. • A new For You tab provides a single place to see recently shared photos, memories, effect suggestions, and more. See Navigate Photos for iOS. • The Import tab has been given a major update. See Import to iOS.

Changes in Photos for Mac

The Mac version of Photos didn’t quite take macOS Mojave off, but its changes have been minimal: • Keyboard shortcuts have been changed. See Navigate the Photos Interface. • Perhaps most notable are the features that have been removed— those for making calendars, books, and other printed materials. However, several companies have released extensions for Photos that offer comparable functionality. See Build Books and Calendars.

10

Switch from iPhoto It’s been several years since Apple officially declared iPhoto a dead app and replaced it with Photos, but for some of us the migration from iPhoto to Photos has been a slow one. Photo libraries may be the most precious troves of data on our computers, and the prospect of moving them to a new app—one that abandons some of the concepts of the current app, no less—can be daunting. The truth is, in most ways, Photos is just an expanded and updated version of iPhoto with a new name. A few organizational features have been lost, the interface is more refined, deep connections to iCloud and Apple’s machine-learning technology have been added, and the app feels faster. Photos can import your iPhoto library (see Import from iPhoto into Photos). iPhoto’s star ratings have been demoted to keyword status, flagged items are now Favorites, and iPhoto Events are now just another kind of photo album. Photos also offers numerous improvements to iPhoto, including expanded editing tools and direct integration with iCloud. With a little time, iPhoto users should be able to settle in comfortably. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to make the switch. Tip: For a closer look at the pros and cons of switching, see Rob Griffiths’ article “An in-depth look at moving from iPhoto to Photos.”

Import from iPhoto into Photos

If Photos is the spiritual successor to iPhoto, it’s only right that Photos can import your iPhoto library, and do so while keeping it intact—more or less (Figure 1). Because the features of Photos don’t align precisely with those in iPhoto, some information from iPhoto ends up in unexpected locations.

11

Figure 1: An iPhoto library (left) migrates to Photos (right).

You’ll need to get used to the changes in Photos—and be prepared to change your approach to organizing your media—but Apple has worked to make the migration process as painless as possible. Don’t Use iCloud (Yet!) On first launch, Photos asks if you’d like to use iCloud Photos. I recommend that you decline for now, and read the Sync with iCloud Using Photos chapter before committing. Don’t worry—it’s quite easy to turn on iCloud Photos at any time.

Import Automatically The first time you launch Photos, it searches your system for iPhoto and Aperture libraries. If only one library fits the bill, it imports that library. Otherwise, it opens the Choose Library dialog (see Manage Multiple Photos Libraries). Choose a library from the list, and Photos prepares the library for import. In some cases, macOS may import your iPhoto library before you ever open Photos. Don’t worry—iPhoto will warn you if this has happened, and you can delete that unedited Photos library and re-import from iPhoto at any time without penalty.

12

Import Any Time If you’re not ready to import your library right away, you can do so later. Hold down Option when you launch Photos to bring up the Choose Library dialog. From that dialog, you can select to import any iPhoto or Aperture library.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

When you import an iPhoto library into Photos, your existing library remains intact. The net result of the import is that you’ll have two separate libraries on your Mac’s drive: your old iPhoto library and a new Photos library (Figure 2). They’ll even have the same name— unless your library contained the word iPhoto, in which case you’ll see it replaced with the word Photos. (So a library called 2010 iPhoto Library will be imported to a library called 2010 Photos Library.)

Figure 2: Your iPhoto library remains intact (left), but a new Photos library (right) comes into being.

If you have a large library, you’re probably worried that a second version of the same library will take up twice the space. But in fact, importing an iPhoto library into Photos uses almost no additional disk space. 13

Note: Once your iPhoto library has been imported into Photos, Apple strongly discourages you from returning to iPhoto. If you do insist on ignoring the warnings, you should know that changes you make in iPhoto won’t be reflected in Photos. The libraries are two completely separate sets of data after import.

Take Stock of the Changes

Apple has endeavored to transfer your data from iPhoto to Photos, even though several features (Events, star ratings) no longer exist. Here’s a guide to what gets imported, and what has changed during the transition.

What’s Still There Most of the stuff that’s in iPhoto is still there in Photos: • Albums: All your iPhoto albums and smart albums should migrate seamlessly to Photos. You can access them via the Albums section of the sidebar. • Projects: Projects, including books, slideshows, and calendars, appear in the Projects section of the sidebar. • Faces: If you used iPhoto’s Faces feature, you’ll find your friends and family in the People album in the Library section at the top of the sidebar. If you used Faces in previous versions of Photos or iPhoto, that information will be brought over and then augmented by the new machine-learning system. • Keywords: All keywords make the move. • Geotags: All location data transfers to Photos.

What’s Missing As you might expect, a few items just didn’t make the transition: • Events: iPhoto’s concept of Events is gone in Photos. Instead, files in your Photos library are always displayed chronologically. Your old Events are imported as albums, and placed in the iPhoto Events 14

folder. This can lead to a messy collection of date-based albums appearing in Photos. The good news is, you can just delete those albums without deleting the photos within them, and use the app’s built-in organizational system instead. • Five-star rating system: Photos abandons the five-star rating system used in iPhoto. Smart albums that rely on star ratings have been rewritten to search for the equivalent keywords.

Set Favorites, Keywords, or Hidden Stars We live in a culture of faves and likes. Netflix used to let you rate movies on a five-star scale; now it’s a thumbs up or thumbs down, a technique pioneered by Facebook. Photos follows this trend by deprecating the star ratings of iPhoto in favor of a more binary approach. Photos are either Favorites, or they’re not. You can mark a photo as a Favorite by clicking the heart icon in the lower-left corner or pressing the Period (.) key. But while star ratings are conceptually gone from Photos, if you used star ratings to organize all of your photos, that information hasn’t been lost! Upon import, Photos transmogrifies every star rating into a special keyword. A photo you gave three stars in iPhoto will appear in Photos with the keyword 3 Star (Figure 3).

Figure 3: You can’t give star ratings anymore, but your old ratings will be imported as keywords, which you can still assign and search for. This is the result of a search for the keyword 3 Star. 15

If you have existing smart albums tagged to ranges of star ratings, Photos will update them to search for the proper set of star-based keywords. You can create new smart albums, too, that take advantage of those particular keywords. As you add new photos, you can keep using these star-based keywords, if you want. To keep assigning those ratings, open the Keyword Manager (press ⌘-K), and then drag those keywords into the Quick Group area. Photos will assign them shortcuts by default—probably the numerals themselves. Once that’s done, there’s nothing stopping you from keeping the Keyword Manager open and just pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 for each photo. Granted, Photos won’t display the stars, but you’ll be gathering the same rating information. For a lot more about how to use keywords, read Organize with Keywords. You might also choose to leave star ratings behind. If so, Photos provides features that let you use all sorts of different approaches to organizing your images. See Manage Your Photos for ideas.

16

Import Your Files into Photos While iCloud can automatically add all the photos you take on your iOS devices to Photos on the Mac (see Sync with iCloud Using Photos), the traditional way of adding items to a Photos library is by connecting a device or memory card directly (Figure 4).

Figure 4: When you attach a camera or insert a memory card, Photos displays its contents in the Import pane. Tip: See Import to iOS if you want to move your images directly onto an iOS device. For information about importing an entire library into Photos, see Import from iPhoto into Photos.

First, you’ll need to decide whether to import photos directly into Photos from your camera (either via USB or by inserting a memory card) or to first import them using Apple’s Image Capture app and then add them to Photos. If you plan to modify your images in some

17

way before Photos ingests them, or if you’d prefer to manually manage where your files are stored, use the second approach.

Import from a Camera

If you’re shooting photos (or capturing video) with a standalone camera, or with an iOS device that isn’t syncing with iCloud, you’ll get your files into Photos by attaching the device or its memory card to your Mac. When you attach a device that your Mac registers as one containing photos and/or videos, your device appears automatically in the Devices section of the sidebar.

Skip Photos Already in Your Library When you attach a device, Photos scans its contents and compares them to its current library. If Photos finds the same images in both places, it collects these items at the very top of the Import pane, marked as Already Imported (Figure 5). Below that, it shows photos that aren’t yet in the library, labeled as New Items.

Figure 5: Photos points out items you’ve already imported into its library.

18

Select Photos to Import In most cases, you’ll want to click Import All New Items. (It may say

All New Photos or All New Videos, depending on what you’ve selected.)

To import only certain items do the following:

1. Click to select those items—selections are indicated by a dimmed image with a blue checkmark in its lower-right corner (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Items selected for import (right) are dimmed and sport blue checkmarks.

2. Click Import Number Selected (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Click the button on the left to import only selected images.

If you’d prefer to import your photos directly into a specific album, you can do that. Choose the album in the Import To pop-up menu, click Import Number Selected, and Photos automatically adds the images to that album. Tip: Select Open Photos if you want Photos to open every time you attach that particular device; uncheck it if you’re annoyed by the app launching when you plug in the device.

View All Your Image Imports Photos keeps track of your past photo-importing sessions and lets you review all the photos you imported at a specific time. To view this list, 19

click the Imports entry in the Library section of the Photos sidebar (Figure 8). This is a great way to scroll back through your photo library, organized by when the particular photos were imported into the library.

Figure 8: The Imports view shows you all the photos you’ve imported into your library, organized by when you imported them.

This list doesn’t display photos synced from iCloud Photos, just images that were brought in to your library via import from a device or a file on disk.

Adjust the Time Stamp on Images Sometimes your library will contain photos of the same event taken by different devices, and they’ll be out of sync with one another. This is annoying. You don’t want pictures of the bride walking down the aisle interspersed with the first dance at the reception. The problem is that while our cellular devices are pretty good at staying in sync via a remote server that they’re constantly checking to set their internal clocks, standalone cameras and other devices aren’t always so punctual. What’s worse, sometimes the users of those de20

vices will set the time correctly but not change their time zone, leading to discrepancies of hours rather than minutes. If you do a little detective work by comparing photos taken at the same time on different devices and looking at what times are listed in the Info pane (press ⌘-I), you can figure out the amount of time that one device (that SLR camera, probably) has lost or gained. I recently had to adjust some shots from a friend’s camera by five hours and four minutes, because he had both failed to adjust his time zone and his standalone camera’s clock was just a little bit off from the one on my iPhone. Once you’ve figured the time adjustment, select all the offending files. (The best way to do this is to look in the Imports list by clicking on Imports in the Photos sidebar.) Then, batch-adjust the date and time of all those images by choosing Image > Adjust Date and Time. Photos will show you the first image you selected, and the time it thinks that photo was taken (Figure 9). Change that time, click Adjust, and the app moves the time of all the photos you selected by the same amount.

21

Figure 9: When you change the time of a batch of images, Photos will show you a single representative image with its timestamp; adjust it and all the other images you’ve selected will be adjusted by the same offset, displayed below the Adjusted time-entry area.

Ideally you’ll get the adjustment time right the first time out, but frequently I discover that my first adjustment wasn’t quite right—the bride walking down the aisle is now interspersed with pictures of the officiant giving her speech—and I’ll have to use the Adjust Date and Time command again to get it right. Eventually you’ll zero in on just the right time and everything will make sense again.

Manage Files Yourself

By default, Photos imports all your files into your Photos Library, essentially outside of your control. If you don’t like the idea of letting 22

Photos control everything for you, you can manage your media the old fashioned way—in the Finder. To do this, choose Photos > Preferences > General, and uncheck the “Copy items to the Photos library” box. If you leave this option turned off, Photos will respect your location preferences. Photos marks images imported by this means with a small icon—of an arrow coming out of a box—in the bottom-left corner (Figure 10).

Figure 10: A user-managed image (left) has a white box and an arrow in the bottom-left corner. If Photos can’t find that file, the white box turns into a yellow alert symbol (right).

All edits you make to the photo will be stored inside the Photos library, but if you delete the original file in the Finder, Photos won’t let you edit that file again. So all the responsibility for managing your files is up to you. User-managed files also won’t sync to iCloud. To add any of these files to iCloud, select them in the Photos library and choose File > Consolidate.

Import to iOS

If you’re shooting pictures out in the field and want immediate access to them for editing or posting, you can do that. Photos on iOS is built to import photos from cameras or SD cards. In fact, when you plug in a

23

device containing photos or videos, Photos automatically opens to the Import tab.

Choose the Right Accessory Apple makes two different accessories that can facilitate transferring photos from an external camera to an iOS device: • With the $29 Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader or $39 USB-C to SD Card Reader, you can pop the SD card out of your camera and read the data right off the card. • The $39 Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter and (for the 2018 iPad Pro) the $19 USB-C to USB Adapter are a bit more versatile. Yes, you can attach them to a camera via USB, but you can also use them to connect iPhones and iPads to other USB devices, such as microphones and network adapters.

Import Your Images In iOS 12, the importing interface is very much like the interface on macOS. When an iPhone or iPad senses that a camera or memory card has been attached, it will launch the Photos app and switch to a new tab: Import. As on the Mac, Photos separates out items that have already been imported to your device and places them in an Already Imported area at the top of the screen. Tap Import to quickly import all new items, or tap to select specific photos or videos to import (Figure 11).

24

Figure 11: The images you select to import appear with a blue checkmark.

Below the Already Imported section, all the other items on the device appear listed by date. Across from each date, you can tap Select to mass select every item taken on that date. Items you select for import appear slightly faded, with a blue checkmark in the lower-right corner. Photos keeps a running count of how many items you’ve selected in the top left; tap Import and then Import Selected to add them to your library. As with Photos on macOS, you can also import directly into a specific Album if you’d like, by tapping the menu next to Import To in the top left corner, and choosing an album, rather than the default, Library (Figure 12).

Figure 12: You can import directly to a specific album by tapping next to the Import To text in the Import tab.

25

Clean Up When the import is complete, you’ll have the option to remove the photos you’ve imported from the card’s memory or keep them there (Figure 13). After this is done, you can disconnect the camera or remove the card.

Figure 13: When your import finishes, you’ll be asked if you want to delete the imported items or keep them on the card or camera.

Import from iOS Apps In iOS, you can import images into your photo library by tapping and holding on images (in many apps) and choosing Save Image from the resulting list of options. In other apps, the Save Image option appears in the bottom row of options after you tap the Share icon. In either case, the image you’ve selected will be added to your iOS device’s photo library—and automatically synced with iCloud Photos, if you’re using that feature.

Weigh New Formats vs. Compatibility Beginning with iOS 11, newer iOS devices (iPhone 7 or later and the 2017 iPad Pro and later) started capturing photos and videos in different formats than before—HEIF for still photos and HEVC for videos. macOS High Sierra and Mojave are compatible with these formats, but if you have devices using earlier versions of macOS or iOS, they won’t be able to view these images or videos. 26

You can force newer devices running iOS 11 or iOS 12 to use the old formats by tapping on Settings > Camera and choosing Formats > Most Compatible. (The bad news is, the new formats use much less disk space than the old ones, so your iOS device will fill up faster!) If you’re using an older version of macOS and try to import photos or videos from a device running iOS 11 or iOS 12, the device will convert those files to compatible formats—JPEG and MPEG-4—on the fly as they’re being transferred to your Mac. If a file in HEIF or HEVC format is imported into iCloud Photos, devices running older versions of macOS or iOS will only be able to see a low-resolution placeholder image and won’t be able to edit those files. (The original file will still sync to the Mac, but it won’t be able to display it!) In general, it’s best if you upgrade all your devices to iOS 11 or later and High Sierra or later in order to use the new file formats. Otherwise the safest thing to do is to switch your iOS devices to capture using the older formats.

Choose Raw, JPEG, or Both

Many standalone digital cameras give you the option of shooting in one of two formats—JPEG or raw. Raw is unprocessed data from the camera’s image sensor, and many photographers prefer to use it rather than JPEG as their source files. If you shoot images in one or the other format, Photos will import that format and work with it. Photos gives you no indication about the file format; it treats raw files and JPEGs exactly the same. However, many cameras also let you capture both file types at once. When this option is on, Photos imports both versions of the image by default, but uses the JPEG format as the basis for editing. This is represented as a J icon on the photo in thumbnail and full-screen view. In editing mode, the format being used is displayed at the top of the window, right below the date and time the photo was taken.

27

If you’d prefer that Photos use the raw image as the basis for all editing, enter Edit mode (select an image and press Return) and choose Image > Use RAW as Original (Figure 14). The image’s thumbnail appears with an R overlay.

Figure 14: This image is being edited as a JPEG, but since it also has a raw version, I’m switching to use that as the basis for all my edits by choosing Image > Use RAW as Original.

28

Manage Multiple Photos Libraries Most people will probably use a single library with Photos. But if you want to keep strict separation between different media collections, it’s easy to create multiple libraries in Photos on the Mac and switch between them (Figure 15).

Figure 15: Two different Photos libraries, with entirely different sets of media.

Reasons to Have Many Libraries There are plenty of scenarios that might lead you to want more than one library: ✦

Create one for each client, if you’re a freelance photographer.

✦

Keep your work photos separate from the family stuff.

✦

Let your kids mess with their photos without trashing your library.

✦

Separate the files you want to sync to iCloud from ones you don’t.

Add a New Library

Here’s how to create a new Photos library: 1. Hold down the Option key as you open Photos.

29

2. In the Choose Library dialog that appears (Figure 16), click the Create New button.

Figure 16: Hold down Option while opening Photos to see the

Choose Library dialog.

Photos asks you to choose where on your Mac’s drive you want to save the new library file.

Switch Between Libraries

Hold down the Option key as you open Photos. In the Choose Library dialog, do one of the following: • If one of the listed libraries is the one you want to open, select it and click the Choose Library button. • To open a Photos library that isn’t listed, click Other Library. Note: The Choose Library dialog lists any importable library it can

find—the app actually searches your Mac for any Photos libraries as

well as not-yet-imported Aperture and iPhoto libraries.

30

Quick Switch Trick: Use the Finder There’s one more way to switch between Library files quickly—open one from the Finder. If you double-click a Photos library in the Finder, Photos will open and ask if you want to switch libraries (Figure 17).

Figure 17: When you double-click a Photos library in the Finder, Photos asks if you want to switch to that library. Click the Switch button to open the library.

Merge Your Photos Libraries

If you need to combine the contents of multiple Photos libraries into one, check out the $30 utility PowerPhotos from Fat Cat Software. PowerPhotos is the successor to the longtime utility iPhoto Library Manager, and it contains many of the same features. You can: • Copy photos and metadata between libraries • Merge libraries • Find duplicate photos • Migrate iPhoto/Aperture libraries If you use iCloud Photos, you can also use it for this purpose; see Merge Libraries in iCloud.

31

Repair a Bad Library

If Photos begins crashing repeatedly or warns you that something is wrong with the library, Apple has provided the capability for Photos to repair its own libraries. From the Choose Library window, select the library you want to repair, hold down the ⌘ and Option keys, and click Choose Library. (If you launch Photos with ⌘ and Option held down, your current library will be repaired.) Photos asks if you want to repair your library, and then sets about trying to fix what’s wrong.

Understand the System Photo Library To simplify the process of syncing files with iCloud, Apple has limited Photos to a single System Photo Library. This is the library that’s capable of syncing to iCloud (see Sync with iCloud Using Photos). There can only ever be one at a time (Figure 18).

Figure 18: If you’re not using the System Photo Library, you’ll find no iCloud options whatsoever in the Photos preferences.

You can designate a new System Photo Library at any time. To do so, open a different library, select Photos > Preferences > General, and click the Use as System Photo Library button. But be warned! This will 32

lead to the contents of your new System Photo Library and your existing iCloud Photos library (if you have one) being merged together into one big library. Which Library Is Which? To help you differentiate between libraries in the Choose Library dialog, Photos adds the phrase System Photo Library after the library that’s capable of syncing with iCloud. If the library you’ve opened most recently is not your System Photo Library, Photos adds the phrase Last Opened after that library. If you click any library, Photos displays the entire file path in text just below the list of libraries.

Use Photo Libraries on External Drives

These days, a lot of Macs ship with Flash Storage drives. Unlike the spinning hard drives of old, these are essentially banks of RAM-like memory with no moving parts, which is why they’re frequently referred to as Solid-State Drives, or SSDs. SSDs are fast and reliable, so much so that I will never, ever go back to using a device that isn’t using an SSD for storage. That said, SSDs are expensive, which means that they are generally very small in order to keep costs down. (You can buy some larger SSDs, but they’ll cost—as of this writing, Apple will charge you $700 to switch from a 1TB fusion drive to a 1TB SSD in a 5K iMac. A 1TB external USB drive costs about $200 on Amazon, while a spinningdisk model costs about $50.) If you’ve got a large collection of photos, this can be a huge issue. My current Photos library weighs in at 400GB, which is much larger than the disk space on my MacBook Air or 5K iMac. (It would also fill half of the space on my iMac Pro’s 1TB drive, which seems excessive.) So what’s a person to do? The answer is to buy an external drive that’s dedicated to being the repository of your photo library. Photos behaves just the same when it’s attached to a library on an external drive.

33

There are a few caveats, however: • The drive needs to be formatted in either APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. • You’ll need to be sure that your external drive is being backed up somewhere. You’ll either need a backup server or a second drive that can back up the contents of the first one. Your photos are too precious not to back up. • You may be tempted to store your files on an external server on your network, such as a NAS (network-attached storage) device. Apple officially discourages this approach (as detailed in this support document), but some people have reported success, sometimes using a disk image formatted in either APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formats as the container for the library. Personally, this seems awfully risky to me, especially with something as precious as photos. Better to buy an external drive. • Apple also doesn’t recommend backing up to less reliable media like SD cards or old-school USB thumb drives. Seems like good advice to me. • Avoid connecting to any Photos library file by opening it via file sharing. I know you want to share your library with your family, but this method can lead to corruption and worse if two people are trying to access the same file at once. If you put your library on an external drive, on the other hand, you can just pass the drive around from computer to computer, and that should work just fine.

Back Up Your Photos

iCloud Photos has been very, very good to me. I have tens of thousands of photos accessible on any of my devices—even though most of those devices don’t have the storage space to hold even a fraction of my library. And if you’re using iCloud Photos, you may think that your photos are backed up. They are, sort of… and Apple’s probably not going to go out of business anytime soon, so your photos are probably 34

secure there. That said, I don’t really recommend you rely on your iCloud Photos for backup of anything as precious as personal photographs. One security flaw or hacker who gets access to your Apple ID could destroy everything. It’s not worth the risk. (And if you’re not using iCloud Photos, what’s your excuse? Everyone needs to back up their libraries!)

Keep a Complete Library Locally I highly recommend that at least one of your Macs have the Download Originals to this Mac option selected (go to Photos > Preferences > iCloud). That way, you’ll always have the complete data set of your photo library on a drive in your possession. The cloud seems pervasive and safe, but cloud outages happen. What happens if your internet connection goes down? What happens if Apple’s the victim of a cyberattack? If you’ve got your photos stored on a local drive, you control them and have access to them whenever you like.

Back Up at Home The easiest way to keep a backup of your Photos library is to back up at home. If you’ve got a NAS or other server that you use as a backup drive, you can use Time Machine to back up your Photos library and you’re set. If you have a big external drive attached to your Mac that does the job, perfect! If you don’t, consider buying one. You should be backing up your entire Mac, really, but at the very least get an external drive and back up your photo library, ideally via an automated system like Time Machine.

Back Up Offsite Having a backup is good protection against hardware failure, but it won’t help you if your house burns down with both your Mac and your backup drive inside. If you’re a regular commuter, one solution to this is to create separate backups that you take to your workplace, swapping it with the one that’s already there. Joe Kissell covers this scenario and many more in 35

his book Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, which is worth your consideration. Another alternative is to back up to the cloud. Yes, if you’re using iCloud Photos you’re sort of doing this, but a little redundancy could make a huge difference in case of disaster. If you’re already using an unlimited cloud-backup service like Backblaze, make sure your Photos library is included in that backup. It will take a while to back up all those files, but the more places your photo library resides in, the better! The free option is to use Google Photos, which will store all your photos, though it will compress photos above 16 megapixels and videos above 1080p resolution. Google Photos is a pretty amazing service in its own right, with its own sophisticated set of machine-learning algorithms, but you don’t really have to use the service’s front-end to use it as a backup. Just install the Backup and Sync app on the Mac you’re using that has a complete selection of photos.

36

Navigate the Photos Interface The macOS Photos interface (Figure 19) is a study in minimalism: most of the action takes place in a single window, which you navigate through by clicking on items in the sidebar. (Of course, that approach doesn’t quite translate to the iOS version—see Navigate Photos for iOS.)

Figure 19: The main Photos interface features a sidebar on the left; clicking in the Photos view brings up a tab bar at the top of the window.

If you make the window very narrow, the sidebar vanishes and you have to navigate entirely from the menu bar. I don’t recommend it.

37

A Quick View of Selections In the top right corner of the Photos window, you’ll see text indicating how many items are currently selected. You can drag the thumbnail image to the right of the text as a proxy of the entire selection, whether it’s into a different app or just into a photo album. Just below the selection indicator is a filter interface; click the text next to Showing and you can quickly filter the view to show only favorites, edited images, photos, or videos.

Browse Your Library

The most important part of the Photos app is probably the Library section of the sidebar, most especially the Photos section, which lets you browse every media file in your library. When Photos is selected, you’ll see four buttons at the top of the screen. Each of these corresponds to a different view of the photo library, moving from the most granular to the broadest overview. Photos displays your entire library; Moments displays the library separated into different sections based on time and location; Collections summarizes multiple-day events; and Years zooms way back to let you browse your collection quickly by year.

Scrub Through Your Photos In the Collections and Years views, Photos shows your library in collages of tiny thumbnails. You can click and drag over the thumbnails to see a larger version of each image as you move over it (Figure 20). Release the button and Photos opens the image you were viewing in the main window.

38

Figure 20: Click and drag over a thumbnail collage to see larger versions of the photos. Tip: If your image is a Live Photo, it will come to life when you hover over it!

Control Thumbnail Views In the Photos and Moments views, you’ll see a small slider bar at the top left of the Photos window (Figure 21). Use it to control the size of the thumbnails on your screen. If you’re using a trackpad, you can also pinch or spread with two fingers to make the thumbnails larger or smaller.

Figure 21: A slider (right) in the title bar means you’re in a thumbnail view; you can use it to adjust the size of thumbnails.

In these two views—as well as when you’re browsing the contents of albums—you can interact with your photos individually (Figure 22). Select a photo by clicking it, or open it at full size by double-clicking.

39

Figure 22: Once you’re in Moments view, it’s all about interacting with individual items.

Things to Do with a Thumbnail When you’ve selected an item: ✦

Favorite: Press Period (.).

✦

Flip: Choose Image > Flip Horizontal or Image > Flip Vertical.

✦

Rotate: Press ⌘-R to rotate counterclockwise. To go clockwise, press ⌘-Option-R.

✦

Open: Press Return.

✦

Edit: Press ⌘-Return.

✦

Hide: Press ⌘-L (see Hide Photos from View).

✦

Duplicate: Press ⌘-D.

✦

Delete: Press the Delete key (see Delete Photos).

View a Summary of a Grouping The header of every Year, Collection, and Moment summarizes the dates and locations of the images in that grouping. Click that header to view an excellent summary (Figure 23). 40

Figure 23: Click the header for a Year, Collection, or Moment to see a summary.

The summary shows selected photos from that grouping, a map displaying where the photos were taken, a list of faces that appear in that grouping, and a list of events related to the particular Year, Collection, or Moment you’re viewing. Click the back button near the left side of the title bar to return to the Photos view when you’re done.

Customize Your View You can choose what information displays in Photos by toggling on and off the items in the View > Metadata menu. In addition to titles, you can choose to display icons indicating whether an image has keywords, has been edited, its file type, and more.

41

Metadata Mania Photos imparts information about an image by overlaying it with little icons that represent the different types of metadata applied to the image (Figure 24). You can choose what information displays by toggling items on and off in the View > Metadata menu.

Figure 24: This image has a lot of metadata surrounding it. However, the item in the top-right corner actually is a cloud. Here are your options: ✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

Titles: The title is displayed below the image when this option is selected. Keywords : This image has keywords. (What are they? Click the tag icon to find out!) Edited

: This image has been edited.

File Type: Shows whether the image is based on the JPEG or version of the file, if it’s an HDR image, or if it’s a Portrait raw Mode image. Favorite

: You liked it!

Referenced File your responsibility. Location

: This file isn’t inside the Photos library and is

: This image has geolocation data.

42

Explore Other Sections in the Sidebar The Library may be the most important section of the sidebar—and it’s where you’ll spend most of your time—but there are a whole lot of other things in the sidebar that you’ll use from time to time. Some of them, like Albums, will section your large library into smaller, more digestible chunks. Others are the basis for slideshows, calendars, books, and other projects.

Explore Two Kinds of Albums The Albums section of the Photos sidebar shows off two different kinds of collections. The Media Types folder contains auto-generated albums for different media types, so you can see every single item in your library that’s a video, selfie, live photos, panorama, screenshot—there are nearly a dozen different options. The My Albums folder contains all the albums you generate yourself, either manually (see Make Albums in Photos) or by using rules to generate a smart album (see Define Smart Albums).

View Shared and Projects The other two main sections of the sidebar are Shared and Projects. Shared lets you control sharing features of the app (see Share Your Photos). Projects contains all the projects you create—see Make Slideshows in Photos and Build Books and Calendars for much more.

Use the Info Window

Loaded with details about the currently selected image (Figure 25) or images, the Info window is one of the most valuable bits of real estate in Photos.

43

Figure 25: The Info window is packed with behind-the-scenes information about your photo.

How to Display the Info Window Select an image that you want to see information about and then do one of the following: • Press ⌘-I. • Control-click the image, and choose Get Info. • Choose Window > Info. • When you’re zoomed in to a single photo, click the Info the right side of the title bar. 44

icon on

What You Can See and Do The top portion of the window shows: • The title you’ve given the image (which you can edit) • The image’s base filename • The date and time the image was taken (see Adjust the Time Stamp on Images, earlier, for how to modify this) • If it’s a Favorite; the heart toggle it)

icon will be filled in (click the heart to

The next section down, shaded in gray, displays metadata (also known as EXIF data) from your camera, including: • Camera name and type of lens • Image dimensions, file size, and file format • ISO, f-stop, flash, white balance, and aperture settings Note: You can’t edit any EXIF information in Photos itself, though

you can do so via an external editor and then manually import the

images. See Import Your Files into Photos for more.

Below the EXIF data, you can: • View or edit a description • View or edit keywords • View any recognized people—and even add new people if viewing the image in full-size view (double-click the image’s thumbnail to switch views) • View, add, or edit the location where your photo was taken

Fill in the Blanks The Info window isn’t just for looking. It’s also a good place to enter a title, description, location, and keywords. 45

You can do this for one image or a whole batch of selected images. All the usual Mac selection tricks work when you select images, so you can, for example: • Press ⌘-A to select all photos in the smart album, or any album, that you are currently viewing. • ⌘-click one photo and then another (and another…) to pick photos scattered in the current view. • Select one image and then hold down Shift while you click another to select all the images in between, as well as the starting and ending image.

Add Geolocation Data In macOS you can add location data to images taken by devices that don’t provide their own location data, like older digital cameras: 1. Select an image or images. 2. Press ⌘-I to open the Info window. 3. Click Assign a Location. 4. Type the address or the name of a city, landmark, or business near where the image was taken. 5. Click the pin on the map to pick it up; you can then drag it around and drop it on the precise location.

Interact With Live Photos

Live photos combine a still image from an iPhone (6S and later) with a video capturing three seconds around the moment when you took the picture.

46

View Live Photos When you’re in a thumbnail view, move your pointer over a live photo to see it animate. When you open a live photo at full size, a Live badge appears in the top-left corner of the image (Figure 26). Move your pointer over it to view the video and hear any sound. If you’re using a device with a Force Touch Trackpad, you can also force-click the photo to play the video.

Figure 26: When you zoom in, a live photo will display a badge in the top-left corner. Click it to play the video.

Share Live Photos You can share live photos from your iPhone via Messages and other apps, most notably Facebook. (Just be sure the Live badge is toggled on, or only a still image will be posted (Figure 27).)

47

Figure 27: In Facebook for iOS, be sure to toggle the Live badge to the correct setting, depending on if you want to upload your highquality still or the video (and audio) of the live photo.

For more sharing options, I highly recommend Google’s Motion Stills iOS app, which stabilizes your Live Photos and lets you export them as videos or animated GIFs.

Disable Live Photos If you want Photos to treat a live photo as if it had no video component, select the photo and choose Image > Turn Off Live Photo. When editing a photo, you can also click the Live Photo icon to toggle this feature on and off.

Modify Live Photos Photos for macOS High Sierra added a bunch of tools for editing live photos, making it possible for you to create time-lapse effects and adjust the thumbnail that’s displayed with a live photo. See Edit Live Photos for more information. Tip: Just because a photo came from a device that can take a live photo doesn’t mean the photo is a live photo. To control whether the icon on the

camera will take a live photo, tap the Live Photo Camera screen.

48

Navigate Photos for iOS

Photos for iOS shares most of its features with Photos for macOS. However, there are some differences, most notably in the Photos interface itself. On iOS 12, the Photos interface is divided into four tabs: Photos, For You, Albums, and Search. The Photos tab displays all the images in your library in chronological order, with newer items on the bottom. You can tap the button at the left side of the title bar to zoom out to the same Year, Collection, and Moment views as on macOS. Tapping a header in the Collection or Moment views will display those photos in the Moments interface, with a prominent header image, a selection of images from the Collection or Moment, a list of people in those photos, a map displaying where the photos were taken, and a list of related Collections or Moments that have something in common with the photos you’re currently viewing (Figure 28).

Figure 28: Tap on the header in Collection or Moment views and you’ll see a Memories-style collection of photos. 49

Navigate the For You Tab The biggest additions to Photos in iOS 12 is the For You Tab, which uses Apple’s machine-learning technology to surface a bunch of photos that the app thinks you might be interested in seeing. This tab contains a collection of Memories (see Unearth Old Photos), which are based on anniversaries of past events, notable trips (using your location data as a cue) and interesting collections of people (using face analysis to see who’s in a shot). There are also Featured Photos, which are individual photos called out by the machine-learning algorithm. The Effect Suggestions list offers photos that it thinks could be improved with some editing (generally by adding a lighting effect to shots taken with the Portrait view available on some modern iPhones). If you tap on an Effect Suggestion, you’ll be shown a preview of what your photo will look like if an effect is added. You can, of course, place your finger on the image itself and see what the original version looks like, to see if you like the effect. To apply the effect, tap Apply to Original at the bottom of the screen. The Sharing Suggestions list identifies events and faces and suggests that you share them with other people, including the people who appear in the pictures. In ideal cases, this prompt can let you quickly share photos with people in your Contacts list via the Messages app. (For more on this feature, see Share with Others via iCloud.) And if you’re sharing albums with other people via iCloud, the For You tab will display recent changes in your shared albums, so you can quickly jump to a shared album that’s had new items added to it.

Find Albums and More Most of the contents of the Photos sidebar on macOS are located in the Albums tab on iOS. At the top of this view you’ll see My Albums, a collection of all your albums—remembering that smart albums you make on macOS won’t sync over to iOS. Below that view you’ll see a collection of Shared Albums, if you’re using iCloud sharing features. 50

Below that is everything else, including links to the People view (see Find and Name People), the Places map (see Find Photos by Location), and long list of views by media type, the Imports list, the Hidden album, and your Recently Deleted items.

Search Without Searching Photos for iOS has powerful search functionality—more powerful, in fact, than the version of macOS (see Use Search to Find Your Photos). Yes, you can search from the Search tab, but it also presents you with a bunch of pre-formatted search queries, based on Moments, People, Places, Categories (see Harness the Power of Categories), and Groups (photos containing specific combinations of people). This view is worth a look, because if you’re planning on doing a quick search for a specific person or place, the results may be a single tab away. Also, if you want to re-do a search you did recently, you’ll find a Recently Searched list at the very bottom of this view.

View a Custom-Made Video As on the Mac, tap the header of a particular Moment, Collection, or Year, to see a summary of that event, including Photos, People, Places, and related events. The big difference is that in iOS, the large image at the top of the summary has a Play button. When you tap it, a video begins to play featuring a montage of photos and videos from that grouping. It’s not quite a slideshow, since Photos itself is making some judgments about what belongs. Tap the video to bring up an interface that lets you modify the feel of the video (Figure 29). (You’ll be prompted to add the collection to your Memories before you can edit it.) Choose a mood from a palette of choices such as Uplifting and Chill (the headings and music will adjust accordingly), and a length (Short, Medium, or Long). You can also share the video with others. (See the chapter Unearth Old Photos for much more.)

51

Figure 29: Photos lets you customize summary videos by choosing from various moods and three lengths. Note: If your iOS device is set to Optimize iCloud Storage, it may need to download data before it can construct the video montage.

52

Manage Your Photos Apple knows most of us don’t have a lot of time to organize our photo libraries. Even though Photos deeply analyzes each image to figure out its contents, it still can’t divine everything about a photo—at least, not yet. That’s why Photos also contains a set of simple organizational tools that let you embed additional meaning into the images you’ve captured.

Play Favorites

Some of us like to precisely quantify things. I knew a kid in high school who actually rated every movie he watched on a five-star system. (He grew up to be a movie critic—true story!) But most of us can’t be bothered with complex ratings systems, so Photos uses a simpler approach: Favorites. In thumbnail views, all your Favorites appear with little white hearts in their bottom-left corner (Figure 30). Awwww. (There’s even a subtle drop shadow, so if that corner of your photo is white, you can still see the heart.)

Figure 30: Find the fave: it’s the one with the white heart in the bottom-left corner.

Click Favorites in the sidebar and you’ll see just your very best shots, as judged by you (Figure 31)!

53

Figure 31: If I had a favorite view of my photos, it would probably be quite similar to the Favorites view.

Make a Favorite on the Mac There are plenty of ways to mark a photo as a Favorite: • Select an image and then click the heart right side of the toolbar (Figure 32).

icon located toward the

Figure 32: Show your love with the heart icon.

• Select an image and press the Period (.) key. • Hover your pointer over the image and click the heart that appears • Select an image and choose Image > Add to Favorites. • In the Info window (press ⌘-I), click the heart right corner.

in the upper-

Make a Favorite in iOS Unfortunately, Photos for iOS doesn’t really let you do much in the way of adding more information to your photos. You can’t even add keywords. You can create albums (see Make Albums in Photos) and you can mark items as Favorites. To favorite a photo, tap its thumbnail to view it full-screen and then tap the heart icon in the toolbar. (If the heart is filled in, the image is a favorite. You can un-favorite the photo by tapping it again.) 54

Photos and the Apple Watch By default, the Apple Watch app will sync your favorited photos—and only your favorite photos—to your watch (Figure 33). However, you can choose to sync a different set of photos instead.

Figure 33: Photos for Apple Watch displays synced photos from a single album, your favorites by default. From the My Watch screen of the Watch app, tap Photos and then choose which album you want to sync. You can also set a maximum number of photos to be synced to the device. The Photos app on the watch is pretty simple. Tap an image to view it full-screen. When in full-screen mode, swipe left or right to view other images. Spin the digital crown to zoom back and view a gallery of all the images that have been synced to your watch.

Organize with Keywords

If the binary nature of Favorites doesn’t work for you, you can get as specific as you like in organizing your photos by assigning them keywords. Keywords can be just about anything—you get to name them and assign them.

55

Assign Keywords To assign keywords: 1. Select a single image, or even a whole group of them, in the main window. 2. Choose Window > Info (⌘-I) to open the floating Info window. 3. Click in the keywords section (if you don’t have any keywords already visible, it will be labeled Add a Keyword) and enter keywords, separated by commas.

Manage Keywords If you maintain a large list of keywords and want to see them all, choose Window > Keyword Manager (⌘-K) to open the Keyword Manager (Figure 34).

Figure 34: Get an overview of all your keywords with the Keyword Manager.

You can use the Keyword Manager to assign keywords to photos, or to edit your list of keywords. To edit your list, click the Edit Keywords button in the Keyword Manager to see the Manage My Keywords view (Figure 35). From here, you can add, delete, and rename keywords, as well as manually assign a keyboard shortcut to a keyword.

56

Figure 35: Click Edit Keywords to see the Manage My Keywords view, which lets you rename, delete, and add keywords, as well as define shortcuts.

Add to the Quick Group Drag a keyword from the lower Keywords list up into the Quick Group for quicker access. Photos automatically assigns a keyboard shortcut to it (available only when the Keyword Manager is visible)—for example, it assigned the letter s to my Softball keyword. These items also appear in the Show Only filter menu at the top right corner of the thumbnail window, so you can view them quickly.

Hide Photos from View

There are some photos you just don’t want to see. (I recently heard from someone who wanted to hide all his photos of his ex-fiancé.) Hidden photos don’t appear in Moments, Collections, Years, or Memories—only in the Hidden album. Here’s how to hide a photo: • In macOS, select images you want to hide and press ⌘-L, or choose Image > Hide X Photos. (To reverse the process, choose Image > Unhide X Photos.) To control whether your Hidden album appears in the Albums pane, choose View > Show/Hide Hidden Photo Album.

57

• To hide a photo in iOS, select the photo, tap the Share icon, and tap Hide (you may need to scroll to the right to see this option). You can also use the Share sheet to unhide images from the Hidden album. If you use iCloud Photos, note that the Hidden album syncs with iCloud and your various devices.

Delete Photos

Sometimes you never want to see a photo again. Here’s how to delete them: • In macOS, select the photo in the Photos pane and then press Delete. • In iOS, to remove a photo, tap the photo to select it, tap the Trash icon, and tap Delete Photo. Deleting a photo moves it to a special album called Recently Deleted. A deleted photo remains in this album for about a month, after which Photos deletes it permanently. If a photo hasn’t aged out of the Recently Deleted album, you can get it back. Open the album, select the photo, and then tap or click Recover. If you use iCloud Photos, deleted photos are moved to the Recently Deleted album on all your devices! You can also recover a photo on any device.

58

Find and Name People Photos performs 11 billion computations on every photo to analyze its contents for faces, scenes, and objects. But while Photos is good at recognizing faces, it’s terrible at putting names to those faces. Unless you’ve been diligent about adding everyone whose picture you take to the Contacts app (complete with a picture that Photos can use to identify them), you’ll need to do some work in the People view (Figure 36), located in the Library section of the sidebar, to teach Photos who’s who.

Figure 36: The People view is a catalog of familiar faces, and it’s where you teach Photos who is who.

Find All Photos for a Person

The People view contains all the faces Photos has identified and connected to a name. If you want to find photos of a specific person, this is the place to go—just double-click an item to see all the photos that Photos has matched to that face. Having your photos tagged based on who’s in them is a great organizational tool. For example, when it’s time to find photos of my family for 59

our holiday cards and annual calendars, I use a smart album that displays photos containing all four of our faces (see Define Smart Albums). It’s sobering to discover that in a full year, you were photographed with your family fewer than ten times. Fix Your Face If you don’t like the picture that represents you (or someone else) in the People view, you can fix that: 1. Double-click the face. 2. Scroll down and find a better picture. 3. Control-click the image and choose Make Key Photo.

Photos reassigns the default image.

Name and Merge People

Apple’s face recognition engine is really good at finding faces. Once it had done its job on my 79,000-image library, it had found 1,000 different faces and plopped them into my People window. Of course, it doesn’t know who most of those people are, and you’ll find that the same people will be listed multiple times. It takes a little work to get your People list in order, though every move you make helps the face recognition engine learn and improve so that it’s better at matching other faces across all your devices. To associate a name with an unnamed face in the People view, move the pointer over any unnamed face and click Name. Then begin to type that person’s name. As you type, a pop-up menu suggests people Photos already knows about via its own catalog of faces or your Contacts app (Figure 37). If one of those is the person you’re looking for, select it. Otherwise, just type the person’s name and press Return.

60

Figure 37: Start typing on an unmatched face and you’ll be offered a list of possible names.

If the full name you assign is already represented in the People album, both sets of photos are merged together. There are several ways to merge faces together. Select the duplicates by ⌘-clicking them. Then, Control-click one of them and choose Merge X People. Or, just drag a selection on top of another face (Figure 38).

61

Figure 38: Drag a face onto another of the same person to merge them into a single entry.

Delete Face Data Entirely So what if you’ve screwed up your face data? Perhaps you misassigned someone, or merged a bunch of different faces together? Don’t despair. This happened to a friend of mine, and he found out that there is a solution that lets your start over from the very beginning. It’s pretty simple: In Photos for macOS, click the People view and press ⌘-A to select every single person in your library. Then press Delete. Photos will ask you if you want to “Reset People Album”. This will let you declare bankruptcy on face training and start again from scratch.

Expect a Long Wait for Old Faces When a new image is imported into Photos, the app scans that image immediately for objects and faces. But if you’ve updated from an older version of Photos or just turned on iCloud Photos, you may need to wait quite some time for Photos to re-scan your entire library. For best results, quit Photos and leave your Mac on (and plugged in, if it’s a laptop) overnight so that it has time to process every single photo you’ve got. The same rule goes for iOS devices—leave them plugged in overnight after you upgrade so they can analyze all the images in your library.

62

See People in iOS

Photos for iOS keeps its list of faces in the People section of the Albums view. From iOS 11 onward, all the face training you do on one device is synced with all other devices, so if you do a lot of work on your Mac, the People view on your iOS devices will get a leg up.

Find People in iOS To see the faces detected in any photo, tap a photo, then scroll down within the photo. Below it, you’ll find interesting information (Figure 39), including a map of where the photo was taken and related Memories collections.

Figure 39: Scroll down to see detected faces, a map, related Memories, and more.

63

Note: Photos generates related Memories collections cleverly, using a bunch of different criteria. An image of a baseball game offered other outings to the ballpark; an image of my mother offered collections of her various visits to our house and ours to hers.

Add New Names in iOS To add a name to a recognized face, tap one of the faces in the People section below the photo. (Or if you’re viewing the People album, tap any unnamed face.) Photos opens a screen for that face, with a collection of photos, related groups and people, places where that person was spotted, and related collections of photos. At the very top of that screen, tap the Add Name header (Figure 40). Enter in the person’s name and click Done. Photos suggests names based on people in your Contacts app, but you can also assign a name that isn’t currently in Contacts. If you identify a person who is already listed in People, Photos merges the two entries.

Figure 40: Tap the Add Name text to assign a name to the face in iOS.

64

Use Search to Find Your Photos All the images in your Photos libraries are scanned millions of times with machine-learning algorithms to identify faces, as well as more than 4,000 different scenes or objects (see Find and Name People for more on face-detection). This makes the Search feature in Photos incredibly powerful. Want to find a photo featuring a dog? Just type dog in the search box. The automatically generated Dog category will provide you with possibilities (Figure 41). And that’s just the beginning.

Figure 41: Photos can do tricks like identify dogs in photos. (Nobody’s perfect, though—it also found a few cats.)

The Search Box Is Your Friend

Some people use search boxes habitually. Others see them as a last resort. If you’re in the latter camp, you need to break from tradition when you use Photos. The Search feature in Photos is terrific. You can quickly search keywords (Figure 42), titles, or descriptions. Enter a year, or a month and a year, and you see all the photos taken during that time.

65

Figure 42: Type the name of a location (here, the island of Kauai) to see all the pictures you took there.

I rely on the Search feature for navigating my library of more than 70,000 photos, and I highly recommend it. When in doubt, use the search box! On the Mac, if you don’t see the search box in the upper-right corner, back out to a broader viewing level, such as the main level of an album. In iOS, if you don’t see the search box, make sure you are in the main level of Photos, Memories, or Albums and tap the Search icon. Quickly Jump to Dates Type a month and year combination to quickly see all photos taken

on that date. So, for example, I enter August 2004 to see all the

images from the month my son was born.

Experience Rich Search Results in iOS In iOS 12, Photos takes a step forward when compared to macOS Mojave. Search results on iOS are incredibly rich. When you search for

66

something, you won’t just find the photos that match, but you’ll also see all the Moments and Albums that contain matching photos. The real power, though—and the place where iOS 12 really has it on macOS—is the capability to combine search terms. If you want to search for a dog, you can type in dog—and you’ll see all the photos that Apple’s machine-learning technology has identified as containing dogs. But on that search-results screen you’ll also see a bunch of suggestions for related items that are often found with dogs—people, locations, even years or seasons. If you tap on one of these items, they’ll be added to your search query, so now you’ll see all instances of, for example, a particular person and a dog (Figure 43).

Figure 43: Search for one item and you’ll be prompted to add a second search term to filter your results, with an indicator of how many photos match both terms (left); tap on one to add it to your search query (right).

Use Siri to Search for Photos On both iOS and macOS, you can use Siri to search through your photos. Just say something like “Show me pictures of dogs” or “Show me photos taken in Hawaii” or “Show me pictures from 2013” and Siri 67

will open Photos and create a special view displaying the results of your search. The results aren’t always perfect, of course, but you’ll be surprised by how easy and natural it feels to say “Show pictures taken in Rhode Island this year.”

Harness the Power of Categories

Apple’s deep image analysis recognizes more than 4,000 different objects and scenes, from alleys to zebras (Figure 44). It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty amazing. (I didn’t even think I had pictures of zebras in my Photos library, but I do!) Today’s iOS devices are so fast they can do this processing as you take photos, but if you’re importing a huge batch of photos onto a Mac or upgrading your entire library, you’ll need to be patient and let it churn for a while.

Figure 44: A search for horses found real horses, toy horses,

statues—and a baseball glove.

Once an image has been scanned, that information is available as a new Category—essentially an invisible keyword assigned by Photos. Unfortunately, categories appear only in the search box—they’re not viewable via the Info window, and you can’t build a smart album based 68

on them. You can’t even search for two categories at once! Still, they’re incredibly powerful at adding a layer of structure over your photos.

Search by Categories To use categories, type a term in the search box and see what comes up. Choose a result labeled Category (Figure 45). It’s a bit like a Google search—you’ll get good results and bad results—but add your own judgment and you can probably find what you’re seeking.

Figure 45: Items labeled as Category (shown here on a Mac) are assigned based on Apple’s automatic machine-learning algorithm.

Search by Multiple Categories As mentioned earlier in this chapter, on iOS you can search on multiple categories or combine a category search with people or locations. After you search for one category, just type in another search term and select it, and Photos will show you all photos that match both terms. When I searched my photo library for dog, I found 729 photos. Adding the category snow dropped the total number of photos to just two—and both of them were pictures of my dog in the snow (Figure 46).

69

Figure 46: With just a couple of taps, I found the two photos out of tens of thousands that are of a dog in the snow.

This is incredibly powerful. If you want to find photos with specific combinations of people, places, or actions, you can do it in seconds. I searched for my son by name and then added the second search term swimming and instantly found 57 photos. Ten years of pool parties, found in just moments.

Turn Categories into Keywords If you want to do more with a category than Apple can deliver—for example, to find horses on a beach—turn the category into a keyword: working on the Mac, select the images within a Category search result (such as beach), choose Window > Info, and apply an appropriate keyword. You can then use a smart album to combine multiple categories by including the new keywords you created.

Find Photos by Location

You can use Photos to view your entire library on a map (assuming the images have geolocation data attached—if not, see Add Geolocation Data, nearby.) 70

Take a Tour To see all your photos on the map, click Places in the Library section of the sidebar (on iOS, Places is in the Albums tab). The resulting map displays square image previews along with numbers to indicate how many photos have been taken in each location (Figure 47).

Figure 47: The Places album shows all your photos, organized by where they were taken.

As you zoom in by clicking the plus/minus buttons, spreading your fingers on a trackpad, or double clicking, the squares divide, offering a more detailed view of locations. These can be remarkably detailed; I was able to zoom in and see the various locations I took photos during a beach walk we took in Hawaii (Figure 48).

Figure 48: Zoom in a long way to get details about exactly where different photos were taken.

71

To see all the photos taken at a given location, just click or tap the square.

Search for a Location If you’re not a fan of zipping around on a map looking for photos, you can also use the search box to find your images by location. Search for the names of cities, counties, states, countries, and even nearby landmarks. I love using search in Photos to find all the images taken in a location. When I type AT&T Park, for example, I am given the option of displaying all the pictures I’ve taken at the place where the San Francisco Giants play.

72

Unearth Old Photos The Memories view in macOS (Figure 49) and the For You tab on iOS present you with collections of photos and videos based on times, place, or theme, so you don’t have to do the work to gather everything together.

Figure 49: The Memories pane shows collections of images and videos that Photos thinks you might like.

The Memories view is located under Library in the macOS sidebar and on the For You tab in iOS, and contains a scrollable list of rectangles labeled with what they contain. Memories are organized automatically by Photos based on a few different concepts: the recent past (“Best of Last Month”), this same time in a previous year (“On This Day”), locations (“Kauai”), and even themes (“In Nature”). It may seem a bit scattershot, but the idea is to help rediscover photos that you’d never otherwise revisit.

73

To begin reliving a Memory, double-click any item in the Memories pane.

What’s In a Memory?

Every Memory begins with a large header image and text describing the Memory. In iOS, this is actually a video you can edit. (See Edit a Memory Video, later in this chapter.) Below this is an automatically generated summary of what Photos considers the “best” images from this Memory. Click Show All to see all the photos and videos that are a part of the Memory. A Memory page can also feature groups and people who appear together in this Memory (Figure 50), a map of locations represented within the Memory, and related Memories.

Figure 50: A Memory also displays people and groups, a map of locations, and related Memories.

74

Take Control of Memories

In macOS, select a Memory and choose Image > Add to Favorite Memories to add it to the Favorite Memories tab. To remove a Memory from the Favorite Memories tab, select it there and press the Delete key. in the top right and choose Add to In iOS, tap on the three-dot icon Favorite Memories to favorite it, or Delete Memory to delete it.

Edit a Memory Video

When you tap a Memory video in Photos for iOS, you can choose to play the video, share it with friends via the Share icon, or even refine its contents by choosing a “mood” (Sentimental, Gentle, Chill, Happy and so on) and a length (Figure 51).

Figure 51: You can play, share, or choose the mood and length of the video from this screen. 75

If the video still doesn’t feel quite right, you can take much more control over the video by tapping Edit to access the Edit screen (Figure 52).

Figure 52: When editing your memory video, you can choose a new name, and add and remove images from the video.

From the Edit screen, you can: • Edit the title of your memory. • Choose a title style. • Select music (from a large collection of tracks offered by Apple, or from items in your own music library). • Set a specific duration. • Add and remove items included in the video. You don’t have complete control over the video—Photos still automatically orders and lays out the final product—but you can remove bad

76

photos and insert that one must-have shot the app forgot, which can make a huge difference. Once you’re done, tap Done. Photos builds a new video! Note: You can View Memories using the Photos app on the Apple TV.

77

Make Albums in Photos Just because Apple has put effort into automatically organizing your photos doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself if you prefer. After all, there’s only so much nuance a computer can bring to organizing our photo libraries. You can create your own collections of items in the Albums section (Figure 53).

Figure 53: Click the Media Types or My Albums folders for a view of all the items contained inside.

This chapter begins by looking at albums in macOS, and ends with a discussion of how to Use Albums in Photos for iOS.

Find Your Albums

At the top of the Albums section, you’ll find a folder called Media Types, which filters all your items down into media with special attributes, such as selfies, panoramas, portrait mode, live photos, videos, screenshots, GIFs, and bursts. There’s also a My Albums folder, where you’ll find all the albums you’ve created, manually or via smart albums (see Define Smart Albums).

78

Make a New Album

To create a new album, choose File > New Album (⌘-N). If you didn’t select anything, the album will be empty. Otherwise, you get a new album made from the photos you’ve selected. Sorting Your Albums Organize your albums by selecting an album and dragging it into place in the sidebar. Alternatively, choose View > Sort and select an item, like By Name or By Newest First, from the submenu. You can also sort the photos contained in albums; see the sidebar

Sorting Photos in Albums, later in this chapter.

Add Photos to an Album

Unless you’re very lucky and select just the right images for your album the first time, you’ll probably want to add items to your album afterward. Here’s how: • Add photos to an album by dropping them over the album in the sidebar. • Select items in Photos and choose Image > Add To and pick an album (Figure 54). (If you’ve recently created an album, you can press ⌘-Control-A to add the photos directly there.)

79

Figure 54: Use the Image menu (or Control-click a photo) to add photos to an album. Note: When you’re in an album, pressing the Delete key doesn’t remove a selected photo from your library, just from the album you’re currently viewing. If you want to remove that item from the entire library, press ⌘-Delete.

Sorting Photos in Albums In most parts of Photos, your items are automatically sorted by date and time, with older items at the top and newer items at the bottom. Albums are different. You can sort the photos within albums by date (with oldest or newest on top) or by title. And if you’d prefer to organize the album yourself, you can always drag photos into any order you like. If at any time you’d like to force an album you’ve manually organized back into a sorted order, choose an item from the View > Sort submenu.

Organize Your Albums

Photos lets you organize albums by placing them within folders. Here’s how to get started: • Create a folder: Choose File > New Folder (⌘-Shift-N). 80

• Populate a folder: Drag one or more albums into it. • Look in a folder: Click the triangle to the left of the folder name. • Delete a folder: Control-click it and choose Delete Folder. • View like a Memory: To apply a Memory-style layout to any of your albums, click “Show as Memory” (Figure 55).

Figure 55: Click Show as Memory to apply a fancier layout to an album. Tip: You can’t select multiple albums in the sidebar, but if you click the enclosing folder, you can select multiple items in the main window.

Use Albums in Photos for iOS

Photos for iOS supports albums and can sync them via iCloud. You’ll find a list of albums in the Albums pane, though if you’re a user of smart albums on the Mac you will be disappointed to discover that your smart albums don’t appear—iOS doesn’t support them. You can view, edit, create, and delete albums in iOS. To create a new icon in Albums view, tap New Album and give album, tap the plus your album a name (Figure 56). You are prompted to choose some photos to put in that album, though it’s not required.

81

Figure 56: Make a new album on an iOS device.

To delete an album, tap Edit in the Albums pane and then tap the minus icon next to the album.

Add Photos to an Album in iOS To add photos to an album: 1. Tap Select in any collection of photos. 2. Tap the photos you’d like to add. 3. Tap Add To at the bottom of the screen and then pick from existing albums (Figure 57) or tap New Album to create an album right there.

Figure 57: You can add photos to any existing album in your library, or create a new one. 82

Remove Photos from an Album in iOS To remove photos from an album: 1. Tap Select in any album. 2. Tap the photos that you’d like to remove and then tap the Trash icon. Photos asks whether you want to remove the photo from just the album or delete it. Tap Delete if you want the photo removed from both your entire library and the album.

Manually Order Your Photos To set your photos in a particular order: 1. Tap Select when you’re viewing an album. 2. Touch and hold on an image, and then drag it where you want.

Define Smart Albums

Smart albums are a great way to collect items based on their attributes, whether they’re inherent to the item itself (such as what camera took the picture) or based on information that you’ve added (such as keywords). Smart albums, which are available only in the macOS version of Photos, let you slice your library in endlessly interesting ways and update automatically to include new photos that meet their conditions (Figure 58).

83

Figure 58: This smart album displays only images containing the faces of me, my wife, and our kids, as recognized by Photos. We are really terrible about taking group pictures.

Create a New Smart Album To create a new Smart Album: 1. Choose File > New Smart Album (⌘-Option-N). 2. In the dialog that appears (Figure 59), name your smart album.

Figure 59: The basic Smart Album dialog.

3. Define the rules of your album as described ahead in this chapter. 4. Click OK. Note: In the Albums pane and the Albums section of the sidebar, a icon appears next to smart album always stands out: a small gear its name or over its preview thumbnail.

84

Editing Smart Album Settings You can always edit the settings of your smart album later to change or fine-tune what it searches for: ✦

Select a smart album and choose File > Edit Smart Album.

✦

Control-click the album itself, and choose Edit Smart Album.

Choose Smart Options Photos lets you find photos and videos based on more than a dozen different criteria (see the Conditions You Can Choose sidebar for a list). If you can imagine a way to slice your Photos library, you can probably find a way to make a smart album to do it: photos of your cousin taken in May 2007; iPhone photos tagged with the keyword Family; favorite images without written descriptions… the works. Smart albums work by responding to different conditions, such as [Person] [includes] Grandma Mary or [Keyword] [is not] [Vacation]. You need only one condition in a smart album, but it becomes more powerful when you add more conditions (Figure 60) by clicking the plus icon to the right of the first condition.

Figure 60: This smart album uses four different rules, and is set to match all conditions. (The total items matched is listed in the lowerleft corner.)

85

Conditions You Can Choose There are plenty of different kinds of data that you can use to build a smart album, including: ✦

Items in a specific (non-smart) album

✦

The date the image was taken

✦

Description text you entered

✦

People detected in an image

✦

The name of the original file

✦

Keywords

✦

Favorites

✦

File type (image, movie, raw)

✦

If an image has been edited

✦

If an image contains geotagging

✦

Model of camera

✦

If the camera flash was used

✦

Type of lens used

✦

Camera settings, including aperture, focal length, ISO, and shutter speed

Expand or Shrink the Search You can set a smart album to match any of the conditions you set, or all of them, by changing the pop-up option just above the stack of conditions. Your choice can result in a very different search. Match All of the Following is best when you’re trying to capture a small group of items—think of the stack of conditions as a set of statements separated by the word “and”: show me photos with the keyword Vacation and the keyword Holiday. Each condition narrows the search results to fewer items. In contrast, think of Match Any of the Following as conditions separated by “or” (Figure 61): show me photos with the keyword Birthday or the keyword Vacation. Each condition finds more items. 86

Figure 61: Using Match Any lets you gather images with different attributes together in a single album.

If you’re looking for smart-album inspiration, a good place to start is the data that’s contained in each photo’s metadata—much of which is displayed in the Info window, accessible by typing ⌘-I. See Use the Info Window for more, er, info.

The Limitations of Smart Albums And now, the bad news. Smart albums are great, powerful tools. Unfortunately, they’re limited in two key ways: • They’re macOS only: You’re not only unable to create or define smart albums in iOS, but you’re also prevented from seeing smart albums you’ve created on the Mac and synced via iCloud Photos. • No categories included: Smart albums don’t have access to one of the more powerful features of Photos: the categories generated automatically via machine-learning-based analysis. I know of two workarounds for moving a smart album to iOS: • Make a regular album: Select all the images in the smart album and then add them to a new album containing its contents. (It won’t update automatically, but at least you’ll be able to access that collection.) • Share it: Select the smart album, click the Share icon on the toolbar, and choose iCloud Photo Sharing and then New Shared Album (read Share Using iCloud).

87

Take a similar approach to photos with categories applied to them: in macOS, search for the category in question, then apply a keyword to all the photos in that search result (see Manage Your Photos). As an extra benefit, you can then use that keyword as the basis for creating smart albums on the Mac.

88

Sync with iCloud Using Photos While Photos works fine as a standalone image library, it’s built to connect with Apple’s online service, iCloud. With iCloud Photos, all your devices can view items stored in a single online library—and add new items to it, giving you access to every item in your media collection from any device (Figure 62).

Figure 62: Check the iCloud Photos box in Photos > Preferences > iCloud to sync with iCloud.

Uploading your library to iCloud adds convenience and a measure of safety to your photo collection, but there are numerous complications to this process, too. The Cost of Cloud Storage As of this writing, every Apple ID comes with 5 GB of free iCloud storage. 50 GB of iCloud space (including not just your photos but your iOS backups and iCloud Drive files) costs $0.99 per month, 200 GB costs $2.99 per month, and 2 TB costs $9.99 per month (To check the latest pricing and rates for different countries, see Apple’s iCloud storage plans and pricing page.) At the high end, that’s a better deal than Google Drive or Dropbox, which charge $9.99 and $8.25 respectively per month for 1 TB. But Amazon now offers unlimited photo storage free for Prime members, and Google Photos offers free unlimited storage space—so long as your photos are limited to 16 megapixels and your video files to 1080p.

89

Set a System Photo Library

iCloud syncing will work only with a single library on your Mac, which Apple refers to as the System Photo Library. It’s generally the first library that you opened when you started Photos. You can have as many libraries as you like (see Manage Multiple Photos Libraries), but only one can sync to iCloud. To change the System Photo Library: 1. Hold down the Option key and launch Photos. 2. Select the library that you want to sync via iCloud, and click Choose Library. 3. Choose Photos > Preferences > General. 4. Click the Use as System Photo Library button (Figure 63).

Figure 63: Click Use as System Photo Library to make your currently open library iCloud eligible.

Turn On iCloud Syncing iCloud syncing is an all-or-nothing proposition. To turn it on, choose Photos > Preferences > iCloud and select the checkbox next to iCloud Photos. Photos immediately begins uploading the entire contents of your library to iCloud.

Choose to Keep Local Copies I have 14 years of digital-camera files in my photo collection, so many that I use an external drive to store them. (The drives inside my computers aren’t big enough!)

90

What that means, though, is that I can’t browse my entire photo collection or add photos to it without attaching that drive. With iCloud syncing, though, you can use Photos to browse your entire collection without it consuming all your disk space. By default, in Photos’ iCloud preferences, the Download Originals to This Mac option is turned on, which means every photo you see in your Photos library resides on your Mac’s drive. But if you change that setting to Optimize Mac Storage (Figure 64), Photos no longer feels the need to store all your files locally. If you try to edit (or view at a large size) an image that isn’t on your Mac, Photos downloads the image from iCloud and then presents it to you. When your drive begins to run out of space, your Mac can delete images from your library to save space, confident that the master files are in the cloud.

Figure 64: These two choices in Photos’ iCloud preference pane determine if your entire iCloud library is stored on your Mac. Warning! If all your Macs are set to Optimize Mac Storage, you’re relying on Apple to keep your photos safe from harm. You shouldn’t consider iCloud Photos a backup! Set at least one Mac to download everything—and then back up that Mac with Time Machine or some other local backup, an online backup service, or both. See Back Up Your Photos for more.

Deal with Missing Data When you’re using iCloud Photos on more than one Mac, photos, folders, albums, and keywords sync between your Macs. However, Categories don’t sync, nor do projects or keyword shortcuts. 91

Every device attached to your iCloud account scans photos for People and Categories separately, but when you manually mark a face in a photo as belonging to a specific person, that data is synced, so your People database on other devices should be similar… if not actually the same.

Merge Libraries in iCloud A common question about Photos is how to merge multiple libraries into a single iCloud collection. Often this is because someone has multiple libraries (perhaps including some converted from iPhoto and/ or Aperture) or photos scattered across multiple computers. For libraries on just one Mac, first allow one library to completely upload to iCloud. Then switch to another library and make it your new System Photo Library (see Set a System Photo Library), and then turn on iCloud Photos in the preferences and wait for all those items to sync to iCloud. You can repeat this process as necessary. (And yes, it will try—not always successfully—to not upload duplicate items.) To speed up the process a bit, select the Optimize Mac Storage option, so Photos isn’t trying to download your entire library every time. Once you’ve settled on a single library file that you’re going to use from here on out, you can turn on the Download Originals to This Mac option if you want to ensure that your Mac contains every single file in your iCloud library. For libraries on multiple Macs, if the Macs are logged in to the same iCloud account, Photos will take care of everything when you turn on iCloud Photos—and all those libraries will merge together. The $30 PowerPhotos is a third-party utility that will merge libraries on disk, at which point they’ll sync up to iCloud.

Understand Sync Relationships Using iCloud Photos to manage photos requires a mental shift. You’re no longer using individual devices, but a single shared library. This has major ramifications. If you edit an image on one device, those edits will 92

propagate (rapidly) to all the other devices. If you delete an image in one place, it will be deleted everywhere. Don’t delete an image on your iPhone assuming it will remain on your Mac, because it won’t. Fortunately, Apple has built in a safety zone. Deleted files spend about a month (the time can vary between 28 and 40 days) in a holding bin before being permanently deleted. To display this bin, select the Recently Deleted album in the sidebar (Figure 65).

Figure 65: You can recover (or permanently delete) items from the Recently Deleted album, which also displays how many days each item has left before it’s automatically removed.

In this view, you can click to select items, and then click the Recover button to move them back to your library. You can also select items and click the Delete button to have them deleted immediately and permanently. Warning! If you use the Finder to copy your Photos library to another Mac, the iCloud Photos syncing process may take a long time. In some circumstances, Photos will try to re-upload every one of its photos to iCloud, which will waste bandwidth and take time. When I alerted Apple to this bug, the response I got back was essentially, “Well, don’t do that!” Fair enough….

Get that Syncing Feeling Good news, everyone! When you sync iCloud Photos with your iOS devices or Apple TV, those devices don’t just have access to all of your photos and videos. You can also view the albums you’ve created, 93

including auto-organized albums such as Favorites, Panoramas, Slomo, and the rest. If you organize using folders, you’ll find those structures intact, too. Smart albums, however, appear only on the Mac.

Use iCloud Photos in iOS When you’ve turned on iCloud Photos on an iOS device (via Settings > Photos), you get the same storage choice as in Photos for macOS—you can force the iOS device to download your entire library, or optimize your library for space and download full-resolution versions only when necessary (Figure 66).

Figure 66: iOS devices have the same choice as Macs: they can store all files on the device (which requires a large device and a relatively small library), or download and cache photos and videos as needed.

Once you turn on iCloud Photos (and give it time to sync), your iOS device’s photo collection will mirror the one in iCloud. You’ll see albums (but not smart albums) in the Albums pane and all your photos in the Photos pane. Edits you make on any device will automatically sync to all the others. 94

Once you start using iCloud Photos, you must change the way you approach managing photos on iOS devices. There’s no need to delete photos from iOS devices in order to free up space. The Optimize iPhone (or iPad) Storage setting will do its best to make sure your device still has free space. Generally, items won’t get deleted from your library until your iPhone is low on space—the figure I’ve heard through the grapevine is when it’s 95 percent full—and then the system will begin searching for purgeable items to be removed, including photos. (Yes, it would be nice if you could tap a button and force Photos to purge everything that’s been synced to iCloud off your device. But Apple thinks that’s too fiddly of an option, so you can’t. Alas.) Once iCloud Photos is turned on, a photo that is deleted in one place is deleted everywhere. (Well, almost. It’s actually moved to the Recently Deleted album and deleted around 30 days later—see Delete Photos, earlier.) Note: If you’ll be using iCloud Photos on an iOS device, be sure to read Hide Photos from View, earlier.

Use iCloud Photos on the Apple TV To start viewing photos on the Apple TV, open the Photos app. You’ll be prompted to log in with your Apple ID. Once you do, you’ll get access to your photos, albums, memories, and more, just on the big screen instead of a smaller device.

95

Make Quick Photo Fixes Photos has a bunch of simple tools that can improve your images quickly and without a lot of fuss. A few don’t even require you to enter image-editing mode. In this chapter, I focus on these “quick-fix” options. For more advanced editing, see the next chapter, Make Edits to Your Photos. If you’re working in iOS, see Process Photos in iOS, at the end of this chapter. Edit without Fear You can always go back to your original image: click the Revert to Original button in the toolbar or choose Image > Revert to Original. This feature is also available in the Edit pane. Photos always stores a copy of your original image.

Edit Without Editing

Two of the quick-editing features in Photos are so quick, they don’t even require you to enter editing mode. These items appear on the toolbar in the top right of the Photos window. Rotation is accessible at all times, and Auto Enhance is accessible after you double-click on any photo.

Use Auto Enhance While Photos gives you lots of tools to tweak your images very carefully, it also offers a sophisticated auto-enhance feature, which you can activate by pressing ⌘-E or (after having double-clicked the photo) clicking the Enhance icon in the toolbar. When you Enhance an image, Photos analyzes it and makes its best guess about the proper levels, color, and more. Since it’s operated by a computer and not a human, the Enhance icon won’t solve every problem. Sometimes it will make your photo look worse, and other times it can be a bit too timid (Figure 67). But it’s 96

always worth a try if you’re not confident using the more advanced features under the Adjust icon.

Figure 67: The Enhance feature tries to improve your photo, but usually doesn’t overdo it. (Here, the right image is enhanced; the left is the original.)

Rotate Photos Sometimes photos are oriented in the wrong direction—usually because they were taken with an older camera without an accelerometer or because you held the camera in such a way that it got confused about which end was up. The Rotate icon lets you quickly fix this by rotating your image in 90º increments (counterclockwise by default, clockwise if you hold down the Option key). You can also rotate counterclockwise by pressing ⌘-R, or ⌘-Option-R for clockwise). For a finer increment of rotation, try the Crop feature’s Auto button, described next.

Make Quick Fixes in Edit Mode

Some other quick-fix features require you to enter Edit mode, which provides you with dozens of tools to modify your images. To enter Edit mode, select an image and press ⌘-Return. (If you’re already viewing a single image, you can either press ⌘-Return or click the Edit button 97

in the top right.) You can move between photos with the arrow keys,

and click Done to exit the view.

When you’re in Edit mode, at the very top of the Photos window you’ll

find three tabs: Adjust, Filters, and Crop (Figure 68). In this section,

we’ll use features in each of these three tabs.

Figure 68: The Edit pane consists of a large image preview, tabs, and a strip of controls down the right side.

Straighten Crooked Photos When you click the Crop tab, Photos shows several options. If you click the Auto button, Photos makes its best guess at aligning your photo so that horizontal surfaces are truly horizontal (Figure 69). When you click the Crop tab, Photos automatically applies an autoalignment if it senses that your photo is not quite straight. You can click the Reset button to belay that order.

98

Figure 69: An image before (left) and after (right) clicking the Auto button in the Crop interface. Note how the horizon is level in the right image.

If you prefer to align your image manually, just drag the wheel to turn your image. You can use the grid overlay to help with alignment (Figure 70).

Figure 70: In the Crop screen, you can rotate the wheel on the right to manually rotate your image to straighten it out. Grid marks are overlaid on your image to help guide you. Aspect ratio controls appear to the right.

99

Change the Composition To better focus attention on your subject, Photos can help to crop out extraneous parts of the image. You can crop the image by clicking and dragging from any corner. As you move the box, a grid appears. This can help you crop according to the photographic rule of thirds, for more attractive compositions. If you’re unsatisfied with the crop you’re making, you can always click the Reset button to go back to the uncropped version of your image. If you’re satisfied, press Return or click the Done button to save your crop and return to your library.

Flip or Change Aspect Ratio Sometimes a photo works better when it’s flipped horizontally or vertically. When in the Crop tab, click the Flip icon to flip your image horizontally (or vertically if you Option-click). Be sure to take a careful look at the photo to see if there’s something that will be recognizably backward, like writing, before you flip it! If you’re planning to make prints, posters, or anything else that requires a specific shape, click the Aspect icon to constrain the crop tool to common aspect ratios, such as square or 16x9 or 3x5.

Give Your Photos a Filtered Look If you’ve ever used Instagram, you know the appeal of filters—effects that add a distinct look to your images by adjusting the color, contrast, and more. Not to be outdone, Photos comes with nine custom filters, all accessible by clicking the Filters tab. These filters come in three variations on three main concepts (Figure 71). There are three black-and-white effects (Mono, Silvertone, Noir), plus “dramatic” and “vivid” effects with warm and cool color variations.

100

Figure 71: Filters show serious variation; pictured above (clockwise from top left): no filter, Vivid Cool, Noir, and Dramatic.

Click a filter a second time to turn it off.

Fix Red Eye Flashes let you take pictures in dark spaces, but they have the unfortunate side effect of producing red eye—when the eyes of your subjects fill with demonic fire. Photos offers a Red Eye removal feature; to access it, click the Adjust tab. In most cases, you can trust Photos to remove red eye for you. Move the pointer over the Red Eye icon and then click the Auto button. The app highlights all the detected red eyes in the image and zaps them away (Figure 72).

101

Figure 72: An image before (left) and after (right) applying the automatic red-eye feature in Photos.

If the Auto button doesn’t quite do it for you, you can click the disclosure triangle to the left, click the paint-brush icon in the Red-eye area, and then click the red areas to let Photos work its magic. In my experience, this feature works shockingly well. If you need to adjust the size of the affected area, adjust the sliding control to the right of the paintbrush icon in the Red-eye area. What Is Red Eye? The red-eye effect happens when the light from a flash bounces off

the back of a subject’s eye. It’s more common in fair-skinned subjects, especially those with blue eyes. That describes three-quarters

of my family, so we break out the red-eye removal feature often.

Process Photos in iOS

Though the editing features of Photos for iOS aren’t as extensive as they are on the Mac, you can still do quite a lot to adjust your images right from your iPhone or iPad. To begin, tap Edit. You see a series of icons quite similar to those found in the editing mode of Photos for macOS: : Found in the top-right corner on the iPhone and in • Enhance the toolbar on the iPad, tap this to automatically enhance the image. 102

• Red Eye : This icon appears only if a face has been detected, and is found in the top row on the iPhone and the toolbar on the iPad. Tap it and then tap an eye exhibiting “red eye” to remove it. : Apply the same nine filters that are available in macOS, • Filters to give your photo a distinct look (Figure 73).

Figure 73: Tap the Filters icon in iOS to choose from nine different filter options.

• Crop : As with macOS, you can crop an image (freely or to a specific aspect ratio) or rotate it arbitrarily, by 90 degrees or via an amount Photos automatically suggests (Figure 74).

103

Figure 74: The Crop tool lets you rotate your image as well as crop it arbitrarily or to a specific ratio.

• Live Photo : Found at the top of the screen on the iPhone and in iPad’s toolbar, you can toggle this icon off if you’d prefer for iOS to treat an image as a still rather than a Live Photo. There’s also an audio icon next to it that you can use to mute Live Photo audio. • Adjust : Tap this icon to bring up an adjustment interface; see the Make Edits to Your Photos chapter for more. • Extensions : Tap here to edit an image with an extension; see the Make Edits to Your Photos chapter for more. Compare What You’re Editing In iOS, you can always tap the photo while you’re editing to see what it looked like before your editing began. The word Original will appear over the image. Tap again (or wait a few seconds) and it will revert to the version with your edits.

104

Make Edits to Your Photos Basic adjustments of the kind I described in the previous chapter, Make Quick Photo Fixes, are often all you need to make your photos come to life. But sometimes you need to take total control over the situation. Select an image and press ⌘-Return (or if you’re viewing a single image, click the Edit button in the top right) to enter Edit mode, then click to switch to the Adjust tab. Along the right side you’ll see numerous tools you can use to make your images look their best (Figure 75).

Figure 75: Exterminate all your images’ flaws with the Adjust tab of the Edit view.

If you’ll be editing in iOS, read this entire chapter to learn the lay of the land and then see Add Adjustments in iOS and Extensions for iOS for iOS-specific details.

105

Adjust Your Photos

Down the right side of the Photos window you’ll see 13 different adjustment controls. When you hover over them, you’ll see that many offer an Auto button to automatically apply basic adjustments, as well as an undo arrow . Click the disclosure triangle to the left of any item to see the controls that live underneath (Figure 76).

Figure 76: Many adjustment options have a primary control (visible once you click the disclosure triangle) made up of component options you can display by clicking another triangle.

Many, but not all, of the adjustment controls offer an interface where you drag a control across a horizontal bar. The center position generally means no effect is applied, while dragging to the right or left applies an effect positively or negatively. For example, as you slide the Color control to the right, your image will become increasingly saturated. If you slide it to the left, the color will gradually drain away.

Rely on Non-Destructive Editing An important thing to understand about using Adjustments is that everything you do is non-destructive. In macOS, every adjustment can be turned on and off at any time by icon. (A checkmark means the adjustment clicking the checkmark 106

is on; a blank circle means it’s off.) You can do this even after you’ve “saved” your changes by clicking Done. Toggling adjustments on and off can be helpful in deciding if they really improve your image.

Fine-Tune Settings All adjustments also offer a basic level of control once you click the disclosure triangle , but many of them offer an additional Options area that you can click to reveal even more detailed controls (Figure 77).

Figure 77: Beneath the Light adjustment is an Options list featuring numerous components you can adjust to fine-tune an overall effect.

These controls are generally the individual components that make up the overall adjustment; for example, the simple Light adjustment is made up of seven separate components, each of which is individually adjustable. To make a radical adjustment, hold down the Option key. The range of some controls will zoom out, providing you with more dynamic range to choose from.

107

13 Ways to Adjust Here’s a complete list of the adjustments available in the Adjust tab: ✦

✦

✦

Light: Makes your image darker or brighter. Includes controls for Brilliance, Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Black Point. Color: Makes the colors in your image more or less vivid. Includes controls for Saturation, Contrast, and Cast. Black & White: Converts your image to monochrome. Includes separate controls for Intensity, Neutrals, Tone, and Grain.

✦

Retouch: See Remove Blemishes and Dust.

✦

Red-eye: See Fix Red Eye.

✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

White Balance: Lets you remove color casts by setting a new white point. You can balance color with neutral gray, skin color, or manually. Levels and curves: Classic controls to adjust the tonal range, contrast and color of a photo, either globally or by specific color ranges. Skilled photo editors can work wonders with these tools. Definition: Adds contour and shape, midtone definition, and contrast. Selective Color: Tools to let you shift specific colors in your image. Noise Reduction: Reduces grain and is useful for low-light conditions. Sharpen: Makes edges crisper and better defined. Includes controls for Intensity, Edges, and Falloff. Vignette: Darkens the edges of the image. Includes controls for Strength, Radius, and Softness.

Remove Blemishes and Dust

The retouching tool, accessible in the Adjust tab by clicking the disclosure triangle to the left of the Retouch section and then clicking the paint brush icon, is a simple brush tool that lets you remove dust, blemishes, and other unwanted junk from images (Figure 78). 108

Figure 78: The retouching tool can remove more than skin blemishes—in this shot it’s removing a stray hair from a dusty iPad.

The slider, visible when you click the disclosure triangle, lets you set how big you want the brush to be. If you’re removing a dust speck or blemish, make the brush roughly the size of that item, then click it. (It helps to be zoomed in close when using this tool.) If that doesn’t satisfy you, increase the brush size or click and drag across the item. Apple suggests dragging in a series of short strokes to blend an item into its surroundings. If the brush makes bad assumptions about what you’re trying to do, you can override these by Option-clicking the texture or color you want the brush to emulate. Then click the item you want to eliminate.

Remove Color Casts

One of the adjustments I use the most is White Balance, which resets the color temperature that’s defined as “white” in a particular image. If you’re not a graphics or photography professional you might not realize that what our eyes perceive as white can actually be various wavelengths, from cold blue to warm orange to sickly yellow. Our eyes and brains adjust our mental color palette automatically—it’s why the world looks blue when you take off a pair of orange-tinted ski goggles— but our cameras aren’t always as good at it.

109

Fortunately, Photos can help. You can use the White Balance adjustment to select something you see in your image that’s white, neutral gray, or even a natural skin tone. Photos uses this as a cue to adjust the color temperature of the entire photo. This simple adjustment can provide a natural appearance to all sorts of images, such as a gross yellow image taken under fluorescent light, a shot of a glacier taken out of a blue-tinted airline window, or a scan of a yellowing photographic print from the ’70s. To make the adjustment, click the eyedropper icon in the White Balance adjustment area. The best option is to choose Neutral Gray from the pop-up and then click on something that should be a neutral gray or white. In a pinch you can select the Skin Tone pop-up and try to balance on someone’s skin. Use the Temperature/Tint slider to directly adjust the color temperature of the image. If it doesn’t look right, keep clicking around and experimenting until you get a pleasing result.

Copy and Paste Adjustments

Let’s say you have a batch of images taken under similar conditions, and you work hard to create the perfect set of adjustments to make one of those images look great. How can you apply that work to all of those other images? With the edited image open in the Edit pane, choose Image > Copy Adjustments (⌘-Shift-C). You can’t apply these adjustments to a batch of photos at once, unfortunately. But once you copy one photo’s adjustments, you can rapidly spread those adjustments to other photos by using the arrow keys to move to the previous or next image and then typing the Image > Paste Adjustments command (⌘-Shift-V).

110

Add Adjustments in iOS

After tapping Edit in iOS, tap the Adjust icon to make edits using tools similar to the ones that are available in macOS. Unfortunately, the controls are much more limited on iOS, but there’s still quite a bit you can do to make your photos look better. iOS adjustments are broken down into three subcategories: Light, Color, and B&W (black and white). When you tap a subcategory, you see a slider that makes a bunch of different adjustments to the photo as you slide your finger. For fine control over adjustments, tap the preferences icon to see the components that make up the larger adjustments, or swipe up to display the component controls one at a time. Tap any component, and you get a slider to adjust the application of that component of your photo (Figure 79). Repeat this process until you’ve got the image you want to see, and then tap Done to save it. Tap cancel to discard any changes you’ve made.

Figure 79: Move your finger along the slider to adjust how the effect is applied to your photo in the iOS version of Photos. 111

Edit Live Photos

Newer iPhones and iPads (iPhone 6s and later, as well as iPad Pro and later) can capture video while you’re taking a still photo, using a feature called Live Photos. Live Photos appear to move as you look at them. You can use Photos to modify these videos, redefine the still image used to represent them, and even crop and enhance. Live Photo editing controls appear just below the bottom of the photo in the Adjust tab. To turn off a Live Photo entirely (in other words, to make it just a “regular” photo), click the Live Photo icon . To turn off sound when the Live Photo plays, click the audio icon.

Adjust How a Live Photo Plays When you play a Live Photo, the video plays (with sound) and then stops. But you can change that via the menu at the right side of the Live Photo editing bar: • Live: This is the default setting. • Loop: The video will play from the beginning to the end, then restart from the beginning, forever. • Bounce: The video will play from beginning to end, then reverse and play from end to beginning, forever. • Long Exposure: The video plays normally, but the Live Photo’s still image is replaced by one that’s taken the frames of the video and calculated what it would look like as a still photo with the shutter left open for a long time. Try it with a waterfall. (Figure 80)

112

Figure 80: The Long Exposure setting transforms your original photo (left) into an image built out of all your Live Photo frames (right).

Set a New Key Photo Sometimes a Live Photo’s video is great, but the still frame representing it—called the Key Photo—is ugly. Pick a different frame of video to be the Key Photo by dragging the small rectangle in the middle of the Live Photo editing area to a new location, then clicking Make Key Photo. The new image will be lower quality than the original photographic still, but if the original was bad, that’s probably just as well! Crop and Filter Live Photos Even though it’s a Live Photo, you can use the Crop tab to re-crop both the photo and the accompanying video. If you apply a filter from the Filters tab, it will be applied not just to your still image, but to the entire video as well.

113

Trim a Live Photo It’s great that Apple shoots three seconds of video before and after you pull the trigger on a Live Photo. But sometimes the beginning or end of the video isn’t perfect—for example, if you had the camera pointing at your shoes just before snapping a picture. Fortunately, Photos now lets you trim what portion of the video is used for your Live Photo. Dead center in the Live Photo editing area in the Adjust tab you’ll find a video strip (Figure 81) that reflects the entire Live Photo video clip.

Figure 81: Make adjustments to your live photo using the yellow trim sliders. Grab either end of the yellow trim sliders to cut out the extra and focus in on the portion of the clip you want to use.

Edit Outside of Photos for macOS

As you’ve seen, Photos offers a wide range of editing tools. But sometimes what you really want is to edit your photo in an external app that has special features or is one you’re comfortable using. Photos offers two different methods for editing images in other apps.

Edit in an External App On macOS High Sierra and Mojave, you can edit photos directly in an external app such as Photoshop. To do this, choose Image > Edit With and pick the relevant app from the list, which can include apps such as Adobe Photoshop CC, Acorn, Pixelmator, or Affinity Photo, if you have them installed. When you save the photo and close the external editor, you’ll see the image updated within Photos. Tip: A quick way to edit a selected image in your most recently used external editor is by using the keyboard shortcut ⌘-Option-Return.

114

If you try to edit a photo that’s been edited in an external app, Photos will warn you first (Figure 82). If you want, you can edit that photo in Photos after you’ve edited it in the external editor. The key thing to remember is that once a file is saved by the external editor, those edits are burned in—you can’t turn them on and off. You can always revert back to your original image, but you can’t pull out any intermediate steps.

Figure 82: Photos will warn you if you try to edit an image that’s already been edited externally.

Edit Using an Extension Extensions are mini-applications from the Mac App Store that can run inside of Photos. To edit with an extension, select an image, click the Edit button, click the Extensions icon in the toolbar, and then choose an option from the menu. Apple offers one extension, Markup, for all users. If you’ve ever wanted to draw on your photos in order to explain them, Markup will make you happy. Click the App Store item to browse other available Photos extensions. There are many cool options. For example, I like Skylum’s Tonality for working with black and white images (Figure 83).

115

Figure 83: The Tonality extension from Skylun, available in the App store, gives you access to many different black-and-white effects.

Unlike Photos’ built-in editing tools, you can’t turn the edits you make using extensions on and off. When you begin to make an edit in an extension, Photos uses your image in its current state, and when you click Save Changes to exit, Photos saves the result. Extensions for iOS Some apps offer extensions for Photos on iOS apps can offer extensions, too. In Pixelmator for iOS, for instance, you’ll find that you can apply its effects directly within Photos by tapping the Extensions icon and then tapping Pixelmator. If you have other image-editing apps on your iOS device, check to see if they offer extensions.

116

Share Your Photos What good are photos if you can’t share them with friends? Traditionally, sharing photos meant sending prints or making albums. You can still do that—see Build Books and Calendars—but sometimes you want sharing to be more immediate. iCloud Photo Sharing lets you share an entire album that others can update and comment on (see Share Using iCloud). And if your desired sharing method requires that you get your photos out of Photos, you can do that too (see Export and Resize Images). At the end of the chapter, I discuss how to Share from iOS.

Use the Share Menu

One way to share images with other apps and macOS system features is to use the Share menu in Photos for macOS. Select a photo, and then choose File > Share, control-click an image and choose Share (Figure 84) from the contextual menu, or select a photo and click the Share icon in the toolbar.

Figure 84: Access the Share menu by Control-clicking a photo. 117

Tip: Mojave removes integration with social media services like Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Vimeo, which means you can’t share directly with those services from Photos on your Mac anymore.

Transfer a Photo Some options in the Share menu directly transfer a photo to another person or a privately shared area: • iCloud Photo Sharing: If you have this feature turned on, click here to add a photo to any of your shared albums. (See Share Using iCloud, later in this chapter.) Images shared using this feature are reduced to 2048 pixels on the longest edge. • AirDrop: Quickly transfer a photo to another device—Mac or iOS— using Apple’s AirDrop technology. • Messages: Send a photo directly to one of your contacts via the Messages app (Figure 85)—all without ever leaving Photos.

Figure 85: You can send an iMessage to someone without even leaving the Photos app.

118

• Other apps: Insert your photo in a document in the Notes app or set it as your desktop picture.

Try Drag and Drop Image Sharing

You’d think the easiest thing to do would be to drag images out of Photos and drop them in other apps, right? Unfortunately, in the early days of Photos this wasn’t widely supported, because of the unique way Photos handled dragging images out of the library. (The solution was always to drag a photo to the desktop, and then drag that file somewhere else.) The good news is that Photos has gotten a lot better when it comes to dragging and dropping. In High Sierra and Mojave, I’ve noticed an increasing number of apps that support direct dragging and dropping from Photos, so if you’re trying to share a photo, it’s worth a try. But if that doesn’t work, you can always drag to the desktop. Photos will copy the image to the desktop at full quality, and every app understands how to insert an image that’s a normal file on the desktop.

Share Multiple Photos

Photos offers a few different ways for you to share more than one photo in one go: • Manual selection: For an arbitrary group, Shift-click or ⌘-click to select a batch of photos and then choose File > Share. Or, Control-click the selected group and choose Share from the contextual menu. • Album: To share an entire album, click its name and then click the Share icon in the toolbar. • Moment: To share a group of photos attached to a Moment, click the date/location header and then click the Share icon in the toolbar (Figure 86.) 119

Figure 86: Click the date/location header in a Moment to open it in a Memory-like view. Once you’re there, you can click the Share icon in the toolbar to share those images.

• Memory: To share photos in a Memory, click the Share the top of the window.

icon at

Export and Resize Images

Sometimes you need to export an image or collection of images, but don’t want or need them at full resolution. (This often happens when I’m uploading a photo as an avatar or background image for a socialmedia service, where there are very specific file-size and image-size constraints.) Photos makes that sort of export a breeze via its Export command. Here’s how to use it: 1. Select the photos. 2. Choose File > Export > Export X Photos. 3. Choose whether to export the images in JPEG, TIFF, or PNG format; whether or not to embed metadata such as titles, keywords, and locations; and which file naming convention to use. 4. To resize the images or set a compression level, click the disclosure caret by the Photo Kind pop-up menu to reveal those options. To constrain images by width or height or by an overall largest dimension, choose Custom from the Size pop-up menu (Figure 87).

120

Figure 87: Photos will resize and recompress a batch of images upon export.

5. Finally, click Export.

Share Using iCloud

Turn on the Shared Albums option, in Photos > Preferences > iCloud, to create a Shared section in the sidebar, from which you can share albums with other iCloud users and subscribe to albums they’ve shared with you (Figure 88).

121

Figure 88: The Shared pane lists folders that you’ve shared with others or that others have shared with you.

Create a Shared Album To create an album and share it with others: 1. In the Shared section of the sidebar, click the plus Shared Albums.

icon next to

2. Name the album. 3. Enter the email address of anyone with whom you’d like to directly share the album. 4. Click Create.

Work with a Shared Album Once you’ve created a shared album, you can: • Add photos: Drag them into the shared album in the sidebar, or select the album and click “Add photos and videos” (under the album title). • Read and add comments: Click the Comments bottom-left corner of a shared image.

icon in the

• Let other people contribute photos: Open your album, click the People button in the toolbar, and select Subscribers Can Post (Figure 89).

122

Figure 89: Create a shared album and choose with whom to share it (left), then use the Settings popover (right) to configure your album.

Share an Album on the Web You can also share the album with someone who doesn’t have an iCloud account, by taking these steps: 1. Open an album that you’ve shared. 2. Click the People

icon in the toolbar.

3. Select Public Website. 4. Copy the URL that appears below that option and send it to anyone, and they’ll be able to view your pictures (Figure 90) in a web browser.

123

Figure 90: Once you select the Public Website checkbox, anyone can use a web browser to view the contents of your shared album.

Share in a Family To access an entire iCloud Photos library, a device must be logged in to that library’s iCloud account. If your family has more than one iCloud account in circulation, this will be a problem. If you use Family Sharing—an iCloud feature—you and your group members have access to an automatically-created, shared Family album. The album works fine, but images in it are reduced to 2048 pixels on the longest edge. It would be much better if you could automatically share full-resolution photos or entire libraries with family members. Maybe someday. Tip: See Joe Kissell’s Take Control of iCloud or Scholle McFarland’s

Take Control of Mojave to learn more about using Family Sharing.

Share from iOS

Of course, you can share images and videos from within Photos for iOS, as well, all from that same Share icon. And since the Share 124

menu is much more widely supported in iOS, it’s the best way to share images on iPhone and iPad.

Choose Photos to Share To share a bunch of items, tap the Select button in the top right and the tap the items you want to select. (This even works inside Memories, if you want to quickly pick some images to share from a Memory.) Once you’ve tapped the Select button, you can also select an entire Moment by tapping another Select button, this one to the right of the header for any given Moment. You can also tap the Share icon when viewing a single photo. You still have the option of sharing multiple items: in the resulting Share sheet (Figure 91) you see your photo selected front and center, but you can scroll left and right to choose other photos to add to your selection.

Figure 91: From the Share sheet you can select additional photos by swiping left and right, use AirDrop, share via an app or service, or perform an action. 125

Share Selected Photos Once you’ve chosen the photos you want to share, you can choose to share them via three methods, organized in three different rows: • Via AirDrop to another Apple device • To an app or service (such as Notes, Messages, Mail, and many other apps you’ve installed) • Using a more complex action (such as running a Siri Shortcut, printing, making a slideshow, or adding them to the Files app, or via iCloud by putting an iCloud link on your clipboard.) Tip: The best app for sharing Live Photos on the iPhone isn’t from Apple: it’s Motion Stills by Google. This app stabilizes your photos and lets you export them as animated GIFs or videos. If you love Live Photos, get Motion Stills.

Share with Others via iCloud Apple has revamped its approach to sharing full-resolution photographs with other people, and the result is a much better method of sharing photos than attaching them to an enormous email message or sending a series of multimedia text messages. This new approach shows up in a few different places. If you bring up a share sheet for one or many photos, you’ll see a Copy iCloud Link option in the bottom row. If you choose this, Apple will generate a shareable URL containing links to all of the photos you selected. You can paste this in an email message, send it via Messages, or copy it into a chat room—anything you want. When anyone clicks on the link, they’ll go to a page on Apple’s servers (Figure 92) that presents them with the images and gives them the option to open them directly in Photos or download them.

126

Figure 92: When you click on a shared iCloud link you can add the images directly to Photos or download them yourself.

Sharing Suggestions via Messages In the new For You tab in Photos on iOS, you may see a row of photos called Sharing Suggestions. This is a set of suggestions generated by Apple’s machine-learning technology based on dates, locations, and faces that appear in photos. What Photos is trying to do is detect special events that featured recognizable people and prompt you to share your photos of that event with those people. It’s a clever idea, and sharing those photos couldn’t be easier. Tap on a sharing suggestion and you’ll see a larger poster image, with a sharing prompt listed below and a large Next button to the right (Figure 93). (You can also tap the Select button if you don’t want to share every photo.)

127

Figure 93: You can quickly share large numbers of photos from suggested events via Messages.

When you tap Next you are prompted to choose who you want to share with. Any faces Photos recognizes that are in your Contacts library will be added by default, though you can remove them and add others. Select who you want to share with and tap Share in Messages. An iCloud link is sent to everyone you selected—whether they use iMessages or not. When they tap the resulting link, they see a similar set of options to the ones people receive when you send a URL via the Copy iCloud Link button (Figure 94).

128

Figure 94: If you receive an iCloud sharing invitation in Messages, you can tap to open it and then tap Add to automatically import all those (full quality) images into your library.

But that’s not all. After you’ve accepted photos, your Photos app will check to see if it’s got any photos it thinks may be from the same event, and will suggest that you share those back (Figure 95).

Figure 95: After you accept a share, Photos will offer to share back photos from the same event.

Apple didn’t used to make sharing full-quality photos this easy. If you want to share photos with friends, keep an eye on the Sharing Suggestions tab and share liberally.

129

View Photos on Apple TV Your living room is a natural place to share photos, and your big highdefinition TV set can be an excellent canvas. If you have a fourthgeneration Apple TV or Apple TV 4K connected to your set, you can view your iCloud Photos, as well as Albums and Memories, in the Apple TV Photos app (Figure 96).

Figure 96: The Apple TV Photos app gives you access to your iCloud Photos library, Memories, and albums.

Don’t Use iCloud Photos? Photos for Apple TV is really designed for iCloud Photos. If you just want to share photos from your Mac to your Apple TV, you can use Home Sharing on your Mac and the Computers app on your Apple TV. (See Photos and Older Apple TVs for info on Home Sharing.)

Scroll Through Photos

The Photos app on the Apple TV is designed to show off your photos and videos, not to let you make edits. The Photos pane displays the

130

entire contents of your iCloud Photos Library separated into Moments, with the newest on top. To view an image full screen, select the photo with the Siri Remote and click. From this view, you can swipe left and right to move to the next and previous photos in your library. Tip: The Apple TV can play back the video version of a live photo.

Swipe up to display the date and time the photo was taken (Figure 97). Swipe back down to zoom back to full size.

Figure 97: Swipe up on a selected photo to see the date and time the photo was taken. Note: Photos not showing? Your teen’s photos showing instead of yours? Read Use iCloud Photos on the Apple TV for help.

View Memories All your Memories are viewable in the Memories pane (Figure 98). You scroll through them from left to right. Click a selected Memory to open that collection.

131

Figure 98: Swipe left to right in the Memories pane to go back in time.

As with iOS, at the top of a Memory is a video that’s automatically created by Photos (and optionally tweaked by you—see Edit a Memory Video). Scroll down to see all the photos in the Memory—click any image to get a larger view. While viewing a photo full screen, you can swipe left and right to see other photos in the Memory. As in iOS and macOS, scroll down to the bottom of a Memory, where you may see related people, related Memories, and even a map of places contained in that Memory. At the very bottom is an option to add the Memory to your Favorite Memories.

View Albums Photos for Apple TV displays the same albums you’ll see in iOS, including the automatically generated albums (Selfies, Panoramas, and the like) as well as albums you create (Figure 99). Click an album to see its contents, and click a photo to view it full screen. Swipe from left to right to move through the photos in that album.

132

Figure 99: All your iCloud albums appear in the Albums pane.

See Shared Items The Shared pane displays the contents of your Photo Stream as well as any albums you’ve shared from iOS or macOS. If you don’t sync photos with iCloud Photos, this may be the only place in the app that you see pictures! Photos and Older Apple TVs If your Apple TV is older than the fourth-generation model featuring an App Store and the Siri Remote, your Photos options are much more limited. You have access to the Photo Stream, which will display the last 1,000 images you’ve added to your library. In truth, using AirPlay to relay images from an iOS device to your

Apple TV is the easiest way to display iCloud Photos images with an

older Apple TV.

You can also use iTunes to sync photos directly to the older Apple TV, by choosing File > Home Sharing and turning on Home Sharing using an Apple ID. Then choose File > Home Sharing > Choose Photos to Share with Apple TV. You’ll be able to choose which images you want to sync to your Apple TV. Another workaround: create and share photo albums (see Share Using iCloud), as if you were sharing them with someone else. These shared albums will appear on older Apple TV models. 133

Make Slideshows in Photos I can’t go to a school function without seeing at least one slideshow. Photos provides seven different slideshow themes (Figure 100), and if you’re the type who wants your slideshows just so, you have a lot of power to control exactly how yours behave.

Figure 100: The Vintage Prints theme may be my favorite of the Photos slideshow themes.

This chapter begins by talking about the slideshow options in Photos for macOS; for iOS information, read Make Slideshows in iOS, at the end of the chapter.

Create a Slideshow

To create a Slideshow select photos and choose File > Create > Slideshow > Photos. Give your slideshow a name, and click OK. A new entry appears in the My Projects section of the sidebar.

134

In the slideshow editor that opens, you can organize the images, choose a theme and music, and determine how long your slideshow lasts, as I describe next.

Choose a Theme Click the Theme Picker icon at the right and then click a theme name. You can re-order the images in all themes by dragging their thumbnails around in the strip at the bottom of the window—drag the rule above the thumbnails up a bit if they’re too small (Figure 101).

Figure 101: Choose a theme from the list at right. You can drag around the small images at the bottom of the screen to re-order the Slideshow.

135

Direct the Ken Burns Effect Some slideshow themes aren’t particularly customizable, beyond the order of the images and the text. But the Ken Burns theme, which slowly pans and zooms across a still image, is. When Ken Burns is selected in the Theme Picker, a Ken Burns Effect icon appears in the lower-left corner of every image. Click it and two more buttons appear: ✦

✦

Use the In-Point icon to set how you’d like your photo to look when it first appears on screen. Use the Out-Point icon to set the appearance of the photos when the slideshow is about to transition to the next photo. (Photos will set a default movement if you don’t customize a photo’s zoom and pan.)

Pick Some Music Though themes come with default music, you can opt to override that selection and choose one—or even many—tracks from your iTunes library to play during your slideshow. To reveal the music picker, click the Music button. The Selected Music section (Figure 102) lists the music that will play with your slideshow. To preview the music, move your pointer over a track and click the Play icon that appears to the left of the track name. To delete a track, click the delete button.

136

Figure 102: Choose a music playlist from within the slideshow editor.

To pick different music, click the disclosure caret next to the Music Library header to display music from iTunes. (You can also choose music from other themes or even from Apple’s Logic music app from the pop-up menu that appears.) Click the Search icon to search your iTunes library, or just scroll through. When you find a track you want to add, click it; it will appear in Selected Music. You can drag tracks around in Selected Music until you get the order you want. Note: Only songs that reside on your Mac and that are not encumbered by DRM (digital rights management) are available. You can’t

use iCloud Music Library and Apple Music tracks.

Set a Duration Click the Duration icon to set how long you want your slideshow to run. You can choose a specific duration or choose Fit to Music, in

137

which case the duration of your slideshow is the running time of the

music you’ve chosen.

The duration of each individual slide in your presentation is generally

determined by the number of slides and the length of the presentation.

If you’re using the Ken Burns theme, though, you can set the duration

of individual slides.

Play a Slideshow on the Fly Don’t want to take the time to craft a slideshow? No problem. To

make a quick slideshow based on one of your albums or Memories,

select the album and click the Slideshow item in the header (Figure

icon on the 103), or double-click a Memory and then click the Play

toolbar. You can quickly choose one of the standard slideshow themes and even pick music you’d like to hear.

Figure 103: Make a quick slideshow of an event by clicking Slideshow in the header. If you’re viewing your library as Moments or Collections, you can click the header that separates every event to open them in Memory form.

Play in Photos

To play a full-screen slideshow from within Photos, click the Play button, located below the slideshow preview in the slideshow editor. When a slideshow is playing, you can use a floating controller (Figure 104) to control the volume, advance forward and backward between slides, and quit.

138

Figure 104: This controller appears when you’re playing a slideshow in Photos. You may have to jiggle your pointer to make it appear.

Loop a Slideshow Before you click Play, you can click the Loop button, located just below the bottom-right corner of the slideshow preview, to have the images in your slideshow keep playing over and over. If the duration of your slides and music doesn’t match, the slides will start over from the beginning as music continues to play. Toggle this feature off (a blue icon means on, black means off) to prevent slides from repeating.

Save a Slideshow as a Video

You can export a slideshow project as a MPEG-4 video file, ready to transfer to iTunes, play back on an iPad, or upload to a video-sharing service like YouTube or Vimeo: 1. Click the Export button in the upper-right corner of the slideshow editor. A dialog opens (Figure 105). Name the file, and choose a folder to save it into.

139

Figure 105: Choose the resolution of your slideshow movie from the Export dialog.

2. Choose which resolution (480p, 720p, or 1080p) you’d like to use. If you’re displaying on an HDTV, for instance, choose 1080p. 3. Specify whether you want the file automatically added to iTunes when the export is complete. (If you select this checkbox, your video will be placed in the Home Videos subsection of the Movies app.) 4. Click Save.

Make Slideshows in iOS

iOS slideshows are much more casual affairs than macOS slideshows. To make a slideshow, tap a photo, tap the Share icon, and select the photos you want in the slideshow. Then tap the Slideshow button (Figure 106), located in the bottom row of the Share sheet.

140

Figure 106: The bottom row of the iOS sharing interface includes numerous actions you can take, including creating and playing a slideshow.

Once you tap the Slideshow button, your slideshow will immediately begin playing. If you’d like to take control of things, tap to reveal the slideshow interface screen (Figure 107).

Figure 107: Tap a playing slideshow to see this interface, including play/pause and AirPlay controls.

From here, you can pause or play the slideshow, send it to an Apple TV via AirPlay, or customize it by tapping Options (Figure 108).

141

Figure 108: In iOS you can choose from five different slideshow themes.

Customize iOS Slideshows Your ability to customize iOS slideshows is pretty limited. You can choose from five different themes (Origami, Dissolve, Push, Magazine, and Ken Burns), choose the music that plays during the slideshow, choose whether the slideshow repeats or not, and set a speed for the slideshow. That’s it. Maybe it’s all for the best that your options are this limited: You can’t save slideshows or share them with other people. iOS slideshows are ephemeral, meant to quickly show off a bunch of photos in your library and then die a silent death. Tip: Each slideshow theme comes with its own music, but you can

mix and match those themes (using the Origami music with the

Magazine theme, for example), or just pick music from your own

library and use that instead.

142

Build Books and Calendars For many years, Apple let you use iPhoto and then Photos to create designs with your photos, upload those designs to Apple’s servers, and then take delivery of custom-printed objects in a few days’ time. My family created annual calendars and books. These physical products are great ways to keep our photos in view throughout the year, even when we aren’t staring at a device. Unfortunately, Apple has decided to get out of the business of producing books and calendars. Instead, it’s allowed third-party services to create special apps and make them available for download in the Mac App Store. These free apps allow you to create projects based on your Photos library and order them from right within Photos. It’s a new approach, but there are a lot of encouraging signs. Here, then, are various ways to get your photos out of your library and into the real world.

Design Books with Mimeo and Motif As of this writing (in late 2018), there are two apps that really excel at letting you build paper books and calendars within Photos: Mimeo Photos and Motif, both free. I’ll describe the process of building books in both of them below.

Build with Mimeo Photos I’ve been very impressed with Mimeo Photos (Figure 109). In general, I found it to be a suitable replacement for Apple’s own book-building tool, with some features that surpass the ones that Apple previously offered.

143

Figure 109: Mimeo Photos lets you build books within Photos, and offers some features that Apple’s implementation never did.

To create a project using Mimeo Photos, first download the app from the App Store. After you launch the app and give it permission to access your photos, you can start a new project by selecting images or choosing an album in Photos and then selecting File > Create > Book > Mimeo Photos. Choose the type of book you’d like to create (Mimeo offers six styles of hard- and softcover books). Click Create, select a theme, and Mimeo generates an automatic layout based on the images you add to the project. Though, I found myself deleting all those pages and then slowly building my own. In the sidebar on the right side of the window, click Layout to view all the optional layouts for a page (Figure 110). Mimeo provides dozens of layout designs based on how many photos you want on a page or spread.

144

Figure 110: Mimeo lets you choose from pre-designed layouts

based on the number of photos you have on a page or spread.

Once you’ve chosen a layout, you can drag photos out of the Photos list (accessible by clicking the Photo icon in the Mimeo sidebar) right onto the rectangles in your document. Where Mimeo really impresses, however, is in its support for free-form layout design. At any point you can change the size or aspect ratio of a photo frame by clicking on the frame and then clicking Transform in the resulting floating menu (Figure 111).

145

Figure 111: Mimeo lets you add and remove photo boxes as well as change their sizes, so you can design every page with any layout you can imagine.

You can entirely remove a frame from a page by selecting it and clicking the Delete button. Add new frames by selecting the Photo list from the Mimeo sidebar and clicking the Add Empty Photo Box button at the bottom of the screen. With these tools, you can customize every page design. For example, I was able to create a page with a single image that spanned the entire spread of the book, crossing two pages—but with two additional pictures floating over that background image on one of the pages. This is a level of control and design freedom that I never felt I had with Apple’s own built-in tools. (Of course, this much freedom can lead to some pretty questionable design decisions, so most people may want to stick with Mimeo’s predesigned templates most of the time.)

Build with Motif Motif, from R.R. Donnelly—the company that apparently was Apple’s source for its own photo books—is also a solid book-design tool. To create a project using Motif, first download the app from the App Store. After you launch the app and give it permission to access your 146

photos, you can start a new project in Photos by selecting images or choosing an album and then selecting File > Create > Book > Motif. After choosing a book format and theme, Mimeo lets you choose if you want it to generate an automatic layout based on the images you have selected by clicking the Autoflow Book button, or will generate an entirely empty layout for you to populate if you click the Don’t Autoflow button (Figure 112).

Figure 112: Click Autoflow Book in Motif to add your photos to the book design. (You can move them around later.) Click Don’t Autoflow to get a blank set of pages you can populate yourself.

In the main Motif window, the photos you’ve added to your project appear in a strip along the bottom. At the top of the screen, there’s a button to let you add page spreads, and two buttons that let you toggle between a per-spread view and a zoomed out view of your entire book. There’s also a slider to let you zoom in and out on the layout. When you’re viewing a spread, at the outside corners of each page you’ll see two controls, one of which lets you pick a layout template for that page, the other of which adds an editable text area to your page. When you click the template icon, the main window changes to show numerous template options for the current number of photos set for 147

that page (Figure 113). At the top of the window, there’s an option to select between one and nine items to fit on the page; click the number of images you desire and Motif will show you the layout options for that number of images.

Figure 113: Motif lets you choose how many photos you want on a page, and provides you with numerous template options.

Once you’ve chosen a layout, you can drag photos out of the Photos list at the bottom of the screen onto the rectangles in your document (Figure 114).

148

Figure 114: Build a book in Motif by dragging images out of the bottom photo strip into the rectangular areas of the layout.

If you find that one photo just needs to be a little taller or wider, don’t worry—Motif lets you slide the divisions between photos back and forth to modify your template. And if you click on any photo box’s frame and click the Trash icon, that photo box is deleted altogether. By using these techniques, you can alter the grid of a page to be almost anything you can imagine. I was able to adjust layouts to take into account extremely tall or wide images.

Enjoy the Results When you’re all done designing your book, click the Buy button in Mimeo Photos or the Checkout button in Motif. You’ll need to buy your book with a credit card and may need to sign up for an account with that service. I’ve found the printing costs of both companies to be comparable to those Apple offered back when it printed books. Your book will be uploaded to Mimeo or Motif’s servers, which can take some time. I was impressed with the quality of the books I ordered from both Mimeo and Motif. The dust jacket style I chose for the Mimeo book— photos on a black background—proved to be a mistake, as Mimeo’s black dust jacket paper showed white cracks at every fold and around 149

the edges. Fortunately, the photos that appear on the outside of the dust jacket are also printed on the hard front cover, so I could discard my dust jacket and be left with an attractive book regardless. Overall, I felt like my book from Motif was of somewhat higher quality than the one from Mimeo. Then again, Mimeo Photos let me design “bonus” photos on the inside dust jacket and the rear of the dust jacket, and Motif didn’t. The Mimeo Photos app has more layout flexibility than Motif does, but both are more flexible than Apple’s old book-building feature within Photos. In short, if you like making photo books, these apps will do the job.

Make a Calendar

We still make a custom calendar every year based on photos we took during each month of the previous year. (So my January 2019 calendar image is from January 2018, and so on.) The good news is that this tradition will be able to live on beyond the death of Apple’s own builtin calendar tools. Both Mimeo Photos and Motif also offer calendarcreation features that use layout tools adapted from the same ones they use for building books. Mimeo Photos has the edge over Motif on the calendar front. It’s got more available template themes and offers the capability to customize the date portion of the calendar (Figure 115).

150

Figure 115: Mimeo Photos lets you customize the bottom half of the calendar, which is always fun.

You can add or remove holidays and even add photos to specific squares. It’s a fun feature that Apple offered in its calendar-building tools, and it’s missing from Motif.

Order Prints and Cards

If you want to order prints or build cards based on your Photos images, my advice is to use a web service like Shutterfly or PaperCulture. I couldn’t find any great plug-ins that add this feature to Photos, and uploading an image or two to a webpage isn’t particularly onerous. I’ve been using PaperCulture for cards for years now, and highly recommend them. They’ve got great templates, excellent paper choices, and will even mail your cards for you if you want.

151

In Praise of Framed Prints Even if you think traditional 4-by-6-inch prints are a relic of the past, you might want to consider experimenting with larger print sizes. I’ve been ordering poster-sized prints from Shutterfly for years, and you can usually find frames to match poster sizes at a local store. For not a lot of money, you can fill your home with faces of your loved ones, favorite vacation spots, or other treasured memories. My house has several large framed posters of my kids (we rotate in new images every few years) and several framed 8-by-10-inch prints, too. Some online stores will even let you print photos on magnets, which is handy for a refrigerator that’s desperately in need of decoration. I can’t think of a better way to keep your photography within view on an everyday basis.

152

About This Book We hope that you found this book both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments and questions in individual chapters. You can also send us email.

Ebook Extras

You can access extras related to this ebook on the web. Once you’re on the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy a subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.) • Read the ebook’s blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview. • Find out if we have any update plans for the ebook. If you bought this ebook from the Take Control website, it has been automatically added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually: • If you already have a Take Control account, log in to your account, and then click the “access extras…” link above. • If you don’t have a Take Control account, first make one by following the directions that appear when you click the “access extras…” link above. Then, once you are logged in to your new account, add your ebook by clicking the “access extras…” link a second time. Note: If you try these directions and find that your device is incompatible with the Take Control website, contact us.

153

About the Author

Jason Snell has been writing about Apple since it was doomed—1994, to be exact—and was the lead editor for Macworld for more than a decade. He writes about technology at sixcolors.com, and is a columnist for Macworld. He hosts many podcasts on the Incomparable and Relay FM networks, including the award-winning The Incomparable, Upgrade, Download, Liftoff, Robot Or Not, and TV Talk Machine. Jason lives with his wife and two children in Mill Valley, California.

Acknowledgments Special thanks to: • Lauren, Jamie, and Julian for putting up with my extra time working on this project in the garage. • Kelly, Scholle, Tonya, Adam and Joe for their hard work in putting the many editions of this book together. • All the TidBITS, Six Colors, and podcast readers/listeners for their thoughtful comments and questions about Photos that helped shape the contents of the book.

154

About the Publisher

alt concepts inc., publisher of Take Control Books, is operated by Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke, who acquired the ebook series from TidBITS Publishing Inc.’s owners, Adam and Tonya Engst, in May 2017. Joe brings his decades of tech writing experience to his role as Publisher. Morgen’s professional background is in development work for nonprofit organizations, and she employs those skills as Director of Marketing and Publicity.

Credits • Publisher: Joe Kissell • Editor: Scholle McFarland • Editor, original editions: Kelly Turner • Cover design: Sam Schick, Neversink • Logo design: Geoff Allen, FUN is OK More Take Control Books This is but one of many Take Control titles! Most of our books focus

on the Mac, but we also publish titles about iOS, along with general

technology topics.

You can buy Take Control books from the Take Control online catalog as well as from venues such as Amazon and the iBooks Store. But it’s a better user experience and our authors earn more when you buy directly from us. Just saying… Our ebooks are available in three popular formats: PDF, EPUB, and

the Kindle’s Mobipocket. All are DRM-free.

155

Copyright and Fine Print Take Control of Photos ISBN: 978-1-947282-29-2

Copyright © 2018, The Incomparable Inc. All rights reserved.

alt concepts inc. 4142 Adams Ave. #103-619, San Diego CA 92116, USA Why Take Control? We designed Take Control electronic books to help readers regain a measure of control in an oftentimes out-of-control universe. With Take Control, we also work to streamline the publication process so that information about quickly changing technical topics can be published while it’s still relevant and accurate. Our books are DRM-free: This ebook doesn’t use digital rights management in any way because DRM makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of this ebook with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, they should buy a copy. Your support makes it possible for future Take Control ebooks to hit the internet long before you’d find the same information in a printed book. Plus, if you buy the ebook, you’re entitled to any free updates that become available. Remember the trees! You have our permission to make a single print copy of this ebook for personal use, if you must. Please reference this page if a print service refuses to print the ebook for copyright reasons. Caveat lector: Although the author and alt concepts inc. have made a reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this book is distributed “As Is,” without warranty of any kind. Neither alt concepts inc. nor the author shall be liable to any person or entity for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation lost revenues or lost profits, that may result (or that are alleged to result) from the use of these materials. In other words, use this information at your own risk. It’s just a name: Many of the designations in this ebook used to distinguish products and services are claimed as trademarks or service marks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features that appear in this title are assumed to be the property of their respective owners. All product names and services are used in an editorial fashion only, with no intention of infringement. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is meant to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this title. We aren’t Apple: This title is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Because of the nature of this title, it uses terms that are registered trademarks or service marks of Apple Inc. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can view a complete list of Apple Inc.’s registered trademarks and service marks. 156