Hey folks. If you have trouble with organizing your photos, don't worry. Today, I'm going
to teach you a workflow that I have perfected over the years that will have your library
cleaned up in no time fly. David's Tricks to Organize Your Photo Library, coming up
next on Tech Talk America.
Hey folks. Today, I'm teaching you a technique that I've taught to hundreds. If not, thousands
of my clients and today, it is my pleasure to share it with all of you. Now, before we
begin, we do have one very quick order of business. Over the last several years, it
has become increasingly difficult for me to be able to make these videos in my current
production space. It's extremely crowded, there's a lot of interruptions and it's become
clear that the time has come to move to a larger space.
Now, my goal is to build a new production studio, sometime in the next year. We're not
talking Paramount Pictures here. What I'm looking to build is something around the size
of a two-car garage with high ceilings. Now, this is not going to be an inexpensive venture
and while I'm prepared to pay for most of the construction, I could really use your
help. So, if you've enjoyed my videos over the years, I'd really appreciate your support.
You can contribute whatever amount you like, either through Venmo at Tech Talk America
by PayPal, which you can do right through my website or if you prefer to use a good
old-fashioned snail mail and a check, the PO Box information is listed in the video
description.
I say this from the heart when I say that I love my job, I love getting to make these
videos for all of you and I would love to be able to continue to do this for years to
come. Okay. That's it. Self-pitch done. That wasn't so bad, right? At this point, let's
get the class started and switch to my Mac.
We are going to start by opening the photos app and then, let's navigate here to where
it's says "My Albums" on the left-hand side. I'm going to guess that many of you probably
already have a few albums that will appear in this space. Now, this might sound scary,
but my advice is that for this process to work best, you really need to start with a
clean slate and remember, deleting albums does not actually delete the photos that are
in the albums. We're just basically removing the filing structure because through this
process, we are going to rebuild it in a way that it's much more organized. So, the trick
here is to just click on any one of these then on your keyboard, you can hit command
and the letter A, as in Apple, that's select all, then you're going to secondary click
on any one of these and as scary as it may seem, take a deep breath and click delete
albums.
The next step is we're going to create a basic folder structure where every folder will contain
a year of photos which will then be broken up and organized into albums. Now, the easy
way to do this is to place your cursor just to the right of where it says, "My Albums",
and then you'll see a little plus icon appear. So, let's click that and select New Folder.
And for now, I'm just going to name this folder "2019". My advice in general is to start in
the present and then work your way backwards. Also, if you do have a period of years where
you don't have as many photos as you would for other years, you can also just name the
folder to represent a span of time. So, for example, you could say the 1990's. Really,
it's about getting whatever structure works for you. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't for
some strange reason, automatically sort these folders into alphabetical order but the good
news is, you can drag and drop them manually.
The next step is we are going to begin the process of creating a smart album for the
year of photos that we're going to be working with. So, here in the side bar, let's open
our folder for 2019 and once again, we hover our cursor over these area, so we get that
little plus button but this time, we are going to select "New Smart Album".
Okay, this next part is critical that you
copy identically. Otherwise, it doesn't work. So, I'm going to ask that you pay a special
close attention to this next part. We're going to start by naming our smart album and I like
to keep things super consistent so let's just call it "2019."
The next step is we're going to click here, where it currently says "Photo" and change
it to "Date Captured". Now, in this next field, we're it currently says "Is", we are going
to change that to "Is in the range" and from here, you can click into this first field
and using a combination of the numbers on your keyboard and the tab key to jump from
field to field. Let's now manually put in these dates so that it goes from January 1st
of 2019 through December 31st of 2019. And you should know, it doesn't matter if this
second date has not yet happened. What I love about this workflow, is it will auto update
as the year progresses. After we have set our date captured, there are still a few more
things that we need to do.
Let's click the plus symbol to add a second rule and you'll notice that when I do that,
before I create my second rule, I actually need to go up here to the very top and see
where it says "Match any of the following conditions", we need to change that to "Match
all of the following conditions". I'm telling you; a lot of people miss this step and if
you do, it'll throw off the rest of the process.
At this point, we need to create a second condition. This maybe a little bit confusing
so, let me just set it up and then I will explain it. We are going to change this next
line from "Date added" to "Album" then the next field, we're going to change from "Is"
to "Is not" and this last field, we're going to leave as any. So, what this basically translates
to, is we want to see all the photos that were taken in a particular year, but we also
want it to hide photos once they've been organized into an album. Otherwise, you would have no
way of knowing which of your photos have already been organized. So, if everything looks good
here, we can now click "Okay". And the rest of the process is easy.
Now, before we continue, I just want you to
take a quick look at the top of my screen and notice the current number of photos that
are in this smart album, just remember that number for a moment, we'll come back to it.
From here, we can now go through all of these photos that I took in the past year and now,
we're going to very quickly turn these into groups of albums. And in order to do this,
you do need to know how to use multiple selection on a Mac. So, if you are already familiar
with this, you can skip ahead to that time code, but for the rest of you, let's review
this technique.
Now, sometimes on the Mac, you want to do something to a bunch of items, whether it's
deleting a bunch of emails, sharing a bunch of files or in this case, selecting a group
of photos to turn into an album. If all of the photos are consecutive, you can simply
click on the first photo in the group and then, hold down the shift key on your keyboard
then while still holding down that shift key, you can scroll down to the last photo in your
group and then click on it. As you can see here, everything in between has now also been
selected.
Alternatively, if your photos are a little bit scattered, you can instead hold down the
command key and individually click the items that you wish to select. I think I'll use
these photos that I took from a recent trip to Vermont, so that I could photograph and
film the foliage with my drone.
By the way, if you want to see the final product of the video that I put together, it's cool,
I'll put a link down below in the video description. So, because these photos are all in a row,
I'll just click on the first one, hold that shift key and then, click on the last one.
Now that I have them selected, here's a simple hot key to remember, command plus the letter
N, as in Nancy, is the shortcut to turn a group of selected photos into an album. Once
you've done that, the next step is to rename the event, since it will take on the name
of the smart album, so let me call this "Droning Vermont".
Now, I want to show you something. Let's go back into that smart album and look at the
total number of photos at the top. As you can see here, the number has dropped by the
same number of photos that are now in that album. So, all you really must do, is repeat
those final three steps. Select the group of photos, hit command N to turn them into
an album, rename it and repeat. We still have a few more tricks to go over so don't go anywhere.
We'll be right back after this brief commercial break.
Now that you've learned how to use smart albums
to organize one year's worth of photos, now we're going to go over how to re-deploy that
smart album, so that you can use it for other years. Once again, let's switch to my Mac.
Now that we perfected this recipe for this
smart album, we can quickly re-deploy it for other years by secondary clicking on this
smart album and then select "Duplicate smart album". By default, this duplicated smart
album will have the same name, which we will change momentarily, but at this point, let's
drag and drop it into my folder for 2018. We will need to make just a couple of small
changes so that this smart album works with a different time span of photos and let's
start by just renaming the actual smart album to make this a lot less confusing, so let's
secondary click on this smart album and let's go to rename and change it from 2019 to 2018.
Now, to change that actual recipe, let's secondary click and select "Edit smart album" and from
here, all we need to do is go into the recipe and change the year. When you click OK, you're
good to go. So, once again, you would just repeat those same steps of selecting a group
of photos, hit command N on your keyboard, rename the album and repeat. As you go through
this process, at some point, you're probably going to encounter older photos that were
not digital, which accidentally started showing up in your smart albums for other years. Now,
in order to correct this, just select that group of photos and then go up here into the
"Image Menu" at the very top of your screen and select "Adjust date and time".
Ultimately, you don't really need to know the exact date, but this will determine the
chronological order of your photos. So, my advice is to just focus on getting the year
right. That way, all your other photos from a similar point in time will all be grouped
together.
So, there you have it, if you just simply follow these steps, your photos will be organized
in no time. If this video helped you, you could help support my YouTube channel and
my new production studio by making a financial contribution of whatever amount you like either
through Venmo at Tech Talk America, through PayPal which you can do at my website or if
you'd like to send a check through the mail, the PO Box info is in the video description.
Thank you so much for watching everyone. This is David A. Cox, with Tech Talk America. Class
dismissed.