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How many times have you been hanging out with someone, and they’ve told you that they want
to show you a photo, only for them to get their phone out of their pocket, open the Photos app,
and then spend way too long scrolling through thousands of photos, while you stand their
feeling, well, awkward? I’m guessing this has happened to all of us at least a few times.
And I think the reason for that, is that people don’t really know how
to use the Photos app on their iPhones. Which is weird because, we all use it,
probably every day, it’s extremely capable, but it’s actually quite over complicated.
So in this video, I’m going to be explaining the Photos app,
from top to bottom, sharing best practices with you for accessing and managing your Photos,
so that you can hopefully avoid any awkward moments for yourself. Stick with me until
the end of the video, I reckon this app has still got a few tricks up it’s sleeve that most people
won’t have been aware of. OK, let’s get into it.
Let’s start with the absolute basics of navigating your way around the app. When you open it up,
you’ll be greeted by your photos, and some buttons. Down at the very bottom,
you’ve got your Library, a section called For You, a section called Albums and a
search option. We’re going to cover each of these in more detail in just a moment.
By default, you navigate to your library, and this is kind of like the shoebox under your bed where
you’ve chucked all of your printed photos, albeit with a bit of organisation going on,
the photos are at least sorted in date order. Oldest photos are at the top,
newest are down here at the bottom. All Photos is precisely what it sounds
like. Quick tip for you, if you ever swipe all the way to the top of this, ie, your oldest photos,
and you want to quickly get back to your newest photos, rather than swiping all the way back down,
just tap the library button again, and your app will instantly whoosh you back.
Notice the date range up at the top of the screen. This is showing you the range of the visible
photos. If you tap on Days, the app will then zoom into a view where it bunches photos together into
more specific date periods. Tap on months, and you can view all photos taken in a specific month,
tap on years to do this for years. Back on All Photos, if you tap this
ellipsis button up at the top, you can zoom in and out, but you can also do this
by pinching and pushing on the screen, like you would when zooming in or out on a photo.
You can use the aspect button to view all photos in their true aspect ratio,
or view them as squares. You can apply a filter,
such as only showing your favourites, photos that you’ve edited, just photos, or just videos.
You can view your photos and videos on a map, which is pretty cool,
as you can zoom in and get quite granular with where certain pictures were taken.
And finally, you can choose whether you should show only your photos,
or photos that have been shared with you also. Select allows you to bulk select images, like you
would anything else on the iPhone, and then either share them, delete them, that kind of thing.
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Your Photos app has a search function, and I think most people don’t use this. I say this,
because whenever I see anyone trying to find a photo on their iPhone, they just kind of
endlessly scroll through their photos app looking for the one in question. You should
try the search function, it’s really very good, and uses machine learning to make it even better.
But like all search functions, it’s only good if you know what to search for, so let me show you.
You can search for obvious things, like items that might be in the pictures that you’re searching
for. House, beach, ocean etc. You can search for more generalist terms like food. In fact,
if I input food, you can see that my phone has given me suggestions for food
related terms that would return results, because the number next to them indicates
the results that the Photos app has found. You can search for periods in time. For example,
if you search for the term ‘one year ago’, your phone will return results from a year ago,
within a few days. Always a fun way to be a bit nostalgic.
You can search for people, and you can search for geographical places.
You can even search using multiple keywords at the same time,
if you know that you’re looking for something really specific.
You can add captions to photos, and the reason that you might want to do this,
is to aid with searching. So, the Photos app is able to search for a large number of things
using machine learning, if I type in the word ‘car’ or ‘boat’ or ‘dog’ or something like that,
your phone is smart enough to be able to return results like this without you
having to explain these items to your phone, but you can help this along by
adding in your own captions. Let’s say for example that you’ve taken a photo,
and you wish to add a hashtag that’s searchable later, this would allow you to do just that.
To add a caption, find the photo that you’d like to add a caption to,
and click on the info button. Then here, where it says, Add a caption, you would add a caption.
Your app has to index the captions, so you can’t always search immediately, especially if you’ve
added loads, but give it a few minutes and then try, and you’ll be able to search using captions.
You can store your photos, videos and other media here in Albums. To create one,
click into the Albums section of Photos, hit the Plus button in the upper right,
and choose what you want to create. An album is a single collection of media.
A folder is a folder, which can then contain multiple albums. So if for example,
you had a trip, but it was spread across 4 different locations, you could create
an album for each location, and store all 4 of those albums in a folder, called ‘my
trip’ or something like that. Annoyingly, you can’t add existing albums to a folder,
you have to create a new album in the folder, and manually move the photos to that folder, which is
kind of dumb in my opinion but there you go. If you use iCloud photos, you can create
shared albums, where you can store a collection of photos together in an album,
and share that album with other people. Those other people can then of course view the photos
and videos using their own device, but you can also do things like leave reactions and comments.
To do this, first of all head to Albums, press the plus icon in the upper left,
and choose New Shared Album. You might need to switch this function on, and you do that
by going to Settings, clicking on your name up at the top, choosing iCloud, then Photos,
and ensuring that Shared Albums is toggled on. Give the new album a name, then choose Next, and
then in the next tab, add a contact or multiple contacts to the album. Then choose Create.
That contact will get a notification with an option to join your album,
which they will have to accept. With the album now created, you can begin
adding content to it, from your Photo Library. Tap into it, then tap the Plus icon, and select the
items you’d like to add. It’s a bit odd, this works as a post, whereby the people you share
the album with will get a notification that you’ve posted new content to the album, so you can choose
to add some information or a comment here at the same time if you wish, but you don’t have to.
Once you post, the photos will show right away in your version of the shared album, but it might
take a while for them to show for other people, as the cloud is doing it’s thing. But hopefully a few
moments later, the other people in your album will be able to view what you’ve just added.
If you really like a photo or video, or if it’s something that you need to access often for
whatever reason, you can favourite it, which puts it in it’s own dedicated favourites album. Doing
this is really easy, just tap the little heart button at the bottom of the screen on any photo
or video. Then, underneath My Albums, you’ll have one called Favourites, which contains anything
that you’ve favourited. This makes finding this content really quick and easy in the future, so
great if you know there’s certain images or videos that you always want to be able to come back to.
If you head into Albums, and then scroll down a little, you can find a section called Media Types.
Media Types is extremely useful, as it applies filters to the content in your library,
allowing you to quickly find media of a certain type, without having to do anything more than
click on a specific button. For example, if you know that you’re looking for a video,
tap into Videos, if you know you’re looking for a Selfie, or a Live Photo,
tap into that. You can see a count next to each category of how many items you have for each.
Where I think this is really helpful, is when we get to things like Screen Recordings
or Screenshots. How many times have you taken a screenshot of something that you wanted to show
to someone else, only to then struggle to find it when you’re put under the pressure of being with
that person? This makes it so much easier, as you can simply head into the screenshots album,
removing much of the noise that makes it difficult to find an image in the first place.
Still in the Albums section, and beneath the Media Types section,
we’ve got Utilities. In here, you can see your Imports, Hidden Photos and Recently Deleted.
Imports is either going to be something you use heavily, like I do, or something you don’t
really use at all, this is where your images that you’ve imported from another device are
stored. For example, something that I do often is take photos on my Sony or Olympus cameras,
then edit them in Lightroom on my computer, and export them as JPEGs. I then drag all of those
JPEGs from my computer into the Photos app. I do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly,
I really like having all my photos in one place, with the exception of work-related photos,
all of my personal photos live in the Photos app. And second, because I take advantage of iCloud,
I’ve got loads of space where I can then store those large JPEGs in the cloud,
and can then access them from all of my Apple devices, including things like Apple TV.
It also makes sharing photos much, much easier. Recently Deleted is exactly what it sounds like,
and images stored in here will remain here for 30 days before they’re automatically
deleted properly from your device. This is worth remembering if you’re deleting photos to try and
make space on your device, that you’ll need to delete them from both the main photos album,
and then again from Deleted Photos to fully remove them from your phone.
Hidden Photos is pretty useful, so useful in fact that I’ll cover it in full in it’s own section.
You can hide photos from your Photo library, meaning that while they still exist on your
device, they’re not visible by you or anyone else browsing through your photo library. To do this,
simply find a photo that you would like to hide, tap the Share button down in the bottom left,
scroll down and choose Hide. You’ll have to confirm this again before it happens,
but essentially your photo is now removed from your main library, and placed instead in your
Hidden album. To view a hidden photo, go to Albums, scroll down to Utilities, head into the
Hidden album, and you can view the images there. To unhide a photo, select it, press the share
button down at the bottom left, and choose Unhide. Now you might be wondering what the point is of a
hidden album which is so easily accessible, but there is a setting that you can tweak to make
this less of an issue. Head into Settings, then Photos, and toggle Hidden Album off.
This basically hides the hidden album, giving you an extra layer of privacy for your hidden
photos. Note that this does of course mean that if you decide that you’d like to access
your hidden photos at a later point, you’ll need to go into Settings and toggle it on.
You can edit your photos in the Photos app with a pretty astonishing level of control,
but let me show you the basics of what you can do. From within a photo, choose Edit.
The Auto button will use AI to have a go at making improvements to your picture, without you having
to get too granular about it, and honestly, I think this is enough for most people. If you tap
Auto, you can then scroll to the right to see all the more minute changes that you can make,
that your phone has made for you, and you can of course tweak any that you like. Photo enthusiasts
will probably hate the idea of people using an Auto mode, but look, you’ve got the option of
either using it, using it as a starting point, or not using it at all, so to each their own.
For each of these options, you’re going to first select it, then scroll using the scroll
bar to apply more or less of that effect. Tap the three circles icon in the middle
down here at the bottom, and these are your filters. Again, lots to choose from,
and you can pick something that suits the mood you’re going for in a particular picture.
Finally, Crop. You can make transformational changes to the image using these three buttons
here. You can rotate the image using these buttons up at the top. And you can crop using this button
up here at the top right. Auto is pretty good, it will use AI to apply an auto crop,
based on what your phone believes is the best look for your image, and again, you might hate
or love this, but it’s often pretty good. Finally, you can markup the image using the
pen icon, and from here you’ve got all of the usual markup options, like pens and pencils.
When you’re done, choose Done, and your changes will be applied.
There’s a great editing function for your Live Photos, which you might not be aware of. If
I find a Live Photo, within the Edit menu, we’ve got all the same editing options that
we’ve got available for all other kinds of photos within the app, but with this being a Live Photo,
there’s an additional edit button up at the top left. A Live Photo is essentially a short video,
where your camera pulls a specific frame to act as the photo itself, but because of this,
you can change how the Live Photo behaves. You can stick with the Live Photo,
or you can switch to a Loop, where the video will run on a loop. Bounce is probably better known as
a Boomerang, where the video plays forwards and backwards. And finally, Long Exposure,
which is awesome for photos like this, where I’ve got a shot of the waves coming in on the ocean.
Continuing the Live Photo theme for a moment, we can set a Live Photo as our phone’s wallpaper,
which may not sound that exciting, but look what happens when we set a Live Photo as a
wallpaper. With the phone locked, I can press and hold the screen to play the Live Photo,
so if you’ve got a Live Photo that you really treasure, this is a method of having
it with you all the time, which I really like. To do this, find the Live Photo in your photos
app, and press the Share button down at the bottom left. Choose Use as Wallpaper, ensure that Live
Photo is on, then choose Set, and then choose Set Both. The Live Photo is now your wallpaper, which
is going to look great whether it’s static on your Home Screen, or a video on your Lock Screen.
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Memories are a fun feature within the Photos app, where your phone will automatically take
photos and videos that you’ve taken, and bring them together into a collated memory, linked to
an event, person, place or something else. Your phone will stitch them together in a stylish way,
and will set them to music, and they can really be pretty good fun. You can even share them with
other people. You can even share them with people who don’t have an iPhone, as the end result is a
video that you can share like any other video. You’ll find them in the Memories section of
your For You tab. If you tap into one, it will immediately begin playing, but you can tap again
to give you some options. You can pause using the play and pause button, and you can view the photos
and videos included in the video as a grid by pressing this button. Tap on an item to view it,
or tap and hold to get more options, like sharing the individual item, making it the key photo for
the memory, removing it from the memory, showing it in all photos, or deleting it.
Tapping on the music button will actually give you access to some image options too, you can
change the overall ‘look’ of the memory using filters, but you can also change the music that’s
accompanying the memory. You can choose from music within the Music app, so if you subscribe to it,
you’ll also get customised suggestions. You can create your own Memory, but to do this,
you’ll need to create an album, and this doesn’t seem to work for shared albums, only ones that
are solely yours. Within an album, tap the ellipsis menu, then choose Play Memory Video.
Finally, if you tap on the ellipsis menu of an actual memory, you can choose to delete it,
or have it feature less often, which is good if you’ve perhaps got a memory appearing that you
don’t want to delete, but perhaps don’t want to be reminded of too frequently.
If you’re viewing a photo or a video, tap on the photo to bring up the on-screen options,
and press the I button down at the bottom. This will then give you information about the photo.
Much of this is known as Exif data, or ‘exchangeable image file’ data. It’s things
like the name of the image, the date and exact time that it was taken,
the specific location where the image was taken, the device used to take the image, even down to
the specific lens of the phone that’s been used, the resolution, size and other bits of key info.
Wherever you see the word ‘adjust’, you can adjust the information, up to and including removing the
location from the image if you wish, by tapping the adjust next to Map, and choosing No Location.
If you want to permanently set this, head into Settings, Privacy, Location Services, and switch
Precise Location off within the Camera option, as well as changing Location Access to Never.
You can use a tool called Visual Look Up to learn more about photos
in your library. According to Apple’s own support website, this only works in the US,
but I can verify that this has been working for me here in the UK for a while now,
and so I suspect this is something that Apple are rolling out on a country by country basis.
Essentially any time that you see this little ‘I’ icon on a photo, it indicates that visual
lookup information is available for something within the photo. It could be that your phone
recognises a place, or a piece of art, or an item like a plant, flower or pet,
and can help you look up information about that thing, or search for web images related to it.
The Live Text version that was first debuted in iOS15 works in Photos. If you have a photo
with text in it, tap and hold on the text to get the same cursor menu that you’d normally
get in something like Notes or Mail. You can then select the text, and from there
you can copy and paste just like you would if this were a regular piece of computer text.
So there you go, the Photos app explained. What about you,
how do you use the Photos app? Any tips or hints that should have been
included? Tell me about them in a comment. And as ever, if you found this video useful,
do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content
like this in the future. See you on the next video.