Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show
you how to export photos from the Photos App on your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters.
Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign.
Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So before I show you all the different ways you can customize how you export photos from the
Photos App let me assure you that if you want to do it just really quickly you can. The simplest
method is you are just in the Photos App here and you can just drag and drop to the Finder.
This could be the Desktop or have another Finder window open right here. Just drag the photo over
and then you can see it appears right here. If you want to export several photos you
can select several of them, I'm going to hold the Control key down and select them.
Drag and you can see it's exporting three and now there's going to be three photos right here
in the Finder. This could be in this folder here or in the Desktop or anywhere you want.
Or perhaps you want to go directly into another app like Pages or Word or maybe into an email
message. So, for instance, here I am composing a message in the Mail App. I could go to Photos. I
could select a photo or photos that I want. Drag and drop right into the message here.
It adds it into the message. Note that when you do this in Mail always pay special attention to
the image size here. All to often I get people that select small and the image is too small to
be usable especially if it is a screenshot. So you want to choose medium or a larger file but
better quality, of course, and large or really good quality, or the actual size
if you want to send somebody the image so they can actually add it to their photo collection.
You want to give them the full resolution image.
But what about if you really want to customize how you export. There's a lot you can dig into.
So instead of dragging and dropping first select the photo or photos that you want
and let's go and edit it first. Now you don't have to edit it to export. But a lot of times
you really should. Even if you want the original photo to just stay like it is in your Photos
collection you'll see how you can edit it here and easily get back to having the original here.
So let's go in here. I'm going to double click, then I'm going to go to Edit,
and here I can do a variety of different things. For instance, I can adjust
the lighting or color. I can go to Crop and crop it here
and get it looking just like I want. I can go to Filters if I like and choose a different filter.
Let's do that one. Done. Now this is what the photo looks like in my Photos
Library. So now when I drag and drop to export I'll actually get this. But when I'm done the
export I can always go back in and when I go to Edit notice there's Revert to Original.
I'll just Undo all those changes and give my original photo back. Or right here, you can always
go to Image and then you have Revert to Original here without even having to go and edit it.
So next let's go to the Export options. I go to File, then Export. You can see I
can export one photo, the normal way to do it, and it has a keyboard shortcut, Shift, Command
E. There's also Export Unmodified Original for 1 photo. So this would ignore all of those changes
and actually export the original image. The exact file that was imported in from your camera or
that came from the iPhone or whatever. We're going to select Export 1 Photo here and now we
get all these controls. First, we can select the photo kind. Usually you want to use JPG.
That compresses the image but is slightly glossy. So it's not pixel perfect but chances are when you
took the photo you saved it as either JPG or HEIC which is slightly glossy as well,
so exporting as JPG isn't really that big of a deal. If you select JPG here you can click
there and now you can select the Quality. So you can have Low, so lower quality but smaller file
size, High to Maximum which is really high quality but a larger file. Definitely much
larger than low. The other thing you can choose here is Size. You can go small, medium, large,
or full size. These will create a smaller image just like we saw there in Mail. So Small will
create a much smaller image. Maybe if you wanted to send somebody something really quick that's
not meant to be saved anywhere. You probably want to go with Large or full size image if it's meant
to be added to somebody's photo collection or you want them to have the best quality.
But you could also go to Custom. Then you get the options to choose the width or the height and it
will adjust the other dimension so it stays with the correct ratio. So you could, for instance,
say I want it to be 1000 pixels wide and then whatever height would then match that. So the
photo looks the same. You could also go dimension and say I want one dimension to be 1000 pixels
and the other dimension to be smaller. So 1000 at the maximum size either height or width.
Let's say we go with Large here so we have a JPG of high quality large. We can decide what to
include. This will be included in the metadata of the photo. So things like title, keywords,
and caption. We can also get to decide whether location information is shared. So if there's GPS
info imbedded in the photo whether that would be included in the export. So in many cases say we're
sending to a friend or family member of course you want to include that. But sometimes when posting
to social media you may want to have that removed especially if it's a photo of say your work or
home or something and you don't want somebody to be able to download that photo from social media
and figure out exactly where that photo was taken. So that's a privacy feature more than anything.
So you could choose the File Name. Either use the original file name, the one that
the camera has assigned to it. You can use the TItle if you assigned a title to that photo.
Otherwise it will default to the file name. You could also do Sequential. So you can include the
prefix, like photo, and if you had selected and exported ten photos it would number them 1-10.
You could also just do the same thing but using the Album Name. So if you're exporting
from an Album that would work there. So in this case it's the Album Test.
I would export Test and then put the number after each photo.
You could also decide on a subfolder format. So using the Moment Name,
that's usually like month and year or something similar, and then it would put each one of those
in a folder. So if you say selected 100 photos and they were spread out over seven different moments
you would get seven folders with the different images from each moment in the proper folder.
The best way to fully understand the File Name options and the subfolder format options is to
experiment. It doesn't hurt to select some photos you have now. Try exporting to the Desktop or a
temporary folder and see the different results you get when you choose the different options.
Even try that with Sizes. Try that with Quality and see what you get. A few minutes
of experimentation right now can give you a really deep understanding of all these
options. So when you need to use them you know exactly which ones are right for that situation.
I just want to point out that there is some other photo kinds you can choose.
Tiff and PNG are lossless and they usually are not great for photos. JPG is best for photos.
But if you're exporting something like a screenshot then PNG will give you the
highest quality. Or if you're exporting to bring it into another app like PhotoShop,
Pixelmator, or one of the Affinity apps or something and you want the highest quality
there because you're going to be adding more layers and doing more editing and things,
then you may want to consider PNG or some photographers prefer Tiff.
There are a couple more export options if you want something different. For instance
I'm going to select all these photos here, ten of them. One thing I could do is I could go to File,
Share instead of Export. I can AirDrop all ten of these photos to a nearby Mac or iPhone. It's
kind of equivalent to Drag and Drop but to another person or device. I can also go to Share and Mail.
It will take all ten of those photos and you could see now they are in one
mail message. Again I could adjust the size here. You could do the same thing to Messages to send
somebody a message with a photo. Another thing you may want to do is go to File, Print. What this
can do for you is export a PDF. So if you want to take a bunch of photos, like these ten right here,
you can set the Options. So, we can choose an option like this where there is two on each page.
Or maybe an option like this where there is a whole bunch on one page.
Whatever you want to do. I'm going to leave it here with this option
and change it so there are fewer columns so it spreads out over several pages like that.
Then I'm going to go to Print and instead of printing I can go PDF. Then either Open in
Preview and I can Save it out of Preview, or Save as PDF. You can give it a name here if you want.
I can save it out. Now I've got this PDF file here. Open it up in Preview and see the different
pages as a PDF. So this is a convenient way to send a group of photos to somebody as a single
file. Or maybe for some work reason you need to send a bunch of photos inside a PDF like this.
So there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can export your photos
from the Photos App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.