Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a look at viewing and organizing photos in the new Photos app.
In the new Photos app there are two main ways to view your photos.
The first is in Photos mode which allows you to view everything in chronological order,
grouped together by either the date or location.
The second way is to view albums that you create yourself.
So, let's first start with the Photos mode.
There are three different levels to Photos.
The top level here is called Years and things are arranged by years and grouped together.
So here you can see that 2014-2015 are grouped together because I don't have very many photos
yet for 2015.
You can see I have forward and backward arrows just like you do in a web browser.
I'm at the top level here so I can't go up any further from years but I can go down into
what are called Collections.
You can see it zooms in there and now the years are broken up into smaller groups by
date range and area.
I can go even deeper here into Moments.
Moments breaks it up into individual days, pretty much, and gives you locations here
as well.
So I can go back and forth fluidly between these.
Now in any one of these views I can tap and hold, or click and hold on my Mac, and I get
this larger preview.
I can kind of go back and forth between them.
It makes a lot more sense here in Years where you can barely see the photos.
So you can quickly go there.
Now if I release my finger off of the track pad it will jump right to editing that photo.
Also you can see here I've got the location.
If I wanted to I can tap or click on the location there and you can see it brings up a map and
shows me groups of photos by location.
Now what will be left out here are photos taken with my larger camera, not my iPhone,
because there is no location information there.
I can go to Satellite and Hybrid view here just as you can in the Maps app.
I can even do 3D and I can zoom in and out.
So a lot of things you can do there with the maps.
You can also get a map view here down at this view as well.
So you can see even closer.
If you take all your pictures with your iPhone or if you've got a camera that has a GPS in
it this is even more useful because every location of every photo is shown on the different
maps.
Now there is really no customization here to the photos view.
It is just one long list of every photo you have in your collection and it allows you
to quickly zoom in to find a photo based on the date or the location.
So if you are an organizer and want to put your photos together in different collections
of your own devising then you really want Albums.
Albums, if you click on that, will take here and show you some albums it already has set
up.
Like, for instance, it will put all the panoramas in a single album.
It also has Faces functionality.
Once you have identified some faces in your photos you can quickly look at a collection
of photos that has a certain person in them.
Then you've got your albums.
Albums you've created.
You can create regular albums or smart albums.
Once you've done that then you can go into these.
These don't have to have all your photos in them.
They can have a small collection of say your favorite photos or photos that have to do
with one thing or the other.
Keep in mind that your photos are only there once.
They are in this one big collection of photos.
Albums are kind of like playlists in iTunes where they are just basically another way
of viewing the photos you have.
So because you see a photo in an album here and it's also here doesn't mean you have it
twice.
You only have it once.
This is just kind of a playlist of them.
You can also have one photo in multiple albums.
So, for instance, you can have an album of your favorite photos and an album of photos
of a trip that you took and have the same photo in both albums.
Just like playlists and how you handle songs in iTunes.
Now let's create a new album.
There are a couple ways to do this.
You go to the File menu and choose New Album.
Now if you have some pictures selected, let's say you are looking in photos view here and
you select some photos and you do New Album it will start up with these photos in there.
So let's go ahead and do that.
We'll give it a name.
Now it doesn't look like anything has happened but if we go over to the albums collection
here we can see there is our Test Album.
We can go into it and find those photos there.
So now the question is how do you add to this?
Well there are a lot of different ways to add to an album.
One way is to return to the photos view and select some more photos.
So let's select these two right here.
I can hit the plus button here and add them to an album and I can select the album I want
to add them to.
So I will add this to Test Album.
Now I look here and I can see Test Album has those extra photos in there.
You can also bring up the sidebar.
The sidebar starts to make the Photos app look a little bit more like the old iPhoto
app.
You can see the Test Album there.
This is the way I like to do it because I can go and go to Photos, notice those buttons
are gone at the top here, and I can actually switch to things on the left.
So I go to Photos and select another image, say this one here, and simply drag and drop
it into Test Album.
So this is kind of how I like to do it.
I can switch to Test Album very easily and switch back to Photos very easily.
So how about deleting photos.
You can select photos in an album here non-consecutively holding the Command key down or arrange holding
the Shift key down.
This is only in the album.
You are not looking in Photos.
So when I delete here it is going to delete it from the album but the original will still
remain there.
The way to do a lot of things here is to use the Control click, or two finger click on
the track pad, whatever your alternate click is and then you get a lot of Commands here.
For instance, Remove from Album.
I like how it is very clear here saying it is going to remove these from the album and
not delete them from our collection.
So let's select one here and Remove from Album and it is gone from the album.
You can also reorder the photos in an album by just dragging and dropping them around.
So Photos caters to a lot of different types of people in terms of how you want to organize
things.
There may be people that don't use albums at all and just like all their photos in chronological
order here.
There may be people that create an album for everything that they do and basically never
look at the photos view and only look at their photos in albums.
There are other people like me that kind of do a mix of both.