welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today we are going to talk about icloud photos yes
that's right you heard it correctly icloud photos and how to see and organize actually
not really how to organize but how to see how icloud photos works amongst all of your
devices what to look for where to sign in and some of the steps along the way let's dive in
all right so the concept of icloud photos is pretty much saying i'm
going to synchronize all my devices with my icloud account my apple id so that all of my
iphone ipad and apple computers are all on the same page when it comes to photographs and videos
meaning if i take a picture with my phone it's going to automatically go to my mac and my ipad
if i delete a picture from my phone it's going to delete it off my mac it's going to delete it
off my ipad so it keeps everything on the same page some people may like that some people may
not it all depends on your particular needs now let's go ahead and look at how it's signed in
where to where to sign into all of your accounts and settings so that the proper synchronization
happens amongst all of your devices so let's start on the computer if we open up system preferences
and i go to my apple id my icloud i want to make sure that under icloud photos is checked so notice
photos is checked here and if i actually go to internet accounts i can also see my
icloud here and photos is it checked here now i'm currently using my personal email address
which is different from my learn with joel at icloud that i created in previous videos
just because i have a lot more photos and i can actually show you a live version that i actually
use personally amongst all my photography that i do as well as my family photos things like that
so first thing to check is on the computer make sure photos is checked in your icloud preferences
the next thing you want to do is when you open up photos you want to go up
to preferences in the top left so click on photos in the top left choose preferences
and go to icloud here and you also want to make sure that icloud photos here is checked if this is
unchecked it's not going to talk to your iphone or ipad or whatever apple devices that you have
it's only going to reference what's physically on this computer now the other choices here are
download originals to mac optimize mac storage and allow shared albums now if you're low on
storage space on your computer i would recommend to optimize the mac storage that way it's not
downloading the full resolution high quality images to your hard drive to your computer
it's just doing thumbnails a very very lower quality size and file if i click on it then it
will download the full resolution but this allows me to still scroll through all my pictures so i
can see everything and then if i actually need the high resolution i just click on it and i can
do what i need to do with it so you want to make sure based off of what works for you if
you're wanting to synchronize your photos across your devices on your mac make sure icloud photos
is checked and then you can determine whether you want to have the downloads or optimize the storage
based off of your storage size and then the shared albums is really really nice i would encourage
everyone to do it i'm not sure why people wouldn't do it this allows you to create kind of an online
private gallery of your photographs that you can easily share with family and friends and
you can even share them with people that don't have an iphone or an ipad or an apple id so
if you think that it's only apple specific you can still utilize this with people that have you
can it actually allows you to send a link so that they can be part of these uh shared albums as well
they just have to click on a link on their other devices so those on the mac that's what we want
to start with now the other thing i want to bring up on the mac just really quickly is in
the general preferences here the library location notice there's an option that says use as system
photo library now you may not run into this but if you do you may have this option not selected
let me show you an example on your computer or on your mac you can actually have multiple photo
libraries so if i go into the finder and i go to the pictures this photo library here this is
actually what contains all of my photographs that i have in my icloud library so the total amount of
storage is 496gb so there's a lot of photos and to give you a reference of what that looks like
if i scroll down to the bottom here it's roughly 27 000 photos 2100 videos so
that's how much space it takes up from my library again your library could be different based off
of the camera that you shoot with and the files that you have but let me go ahead and i'm going
to create i'm going to hold down option on the keyboard and click on photos and this actually
allows me to create a brand new library i'm going to go create new and we're just going to do i'll
just leave it as photo library 2. i'll keep it in the pictures folder and i'm going to click ok
now when i do that and i go back to the preferences of photos notice this option
is not grayed out and if i go to icloud notice it's saying hey your photos are being synced with
the system photo library now if i clicked back on general and i click this option which i don't want
to do if i click to use a system photo library it's going to try and start to redownload all
of that videos and all of the photos associated with my account into this brand new library so i
don't want to do that not at all but if you ever see that that's kind of what it's talking about
your system library is the photo library that is tied to your icloud your your icloud photo account
um so just know that if you accidentally created two photo libraries or maybe you did it on purpose
that's what that option means so i'm gonna take this account now and i'm just gonna delete it off
the computer and i'm gonna open up my original one and if i go back to the preferences you'll
notice it's grayed out because it is being used as the system library and if i go back to icloud i
have the ability to have all of my options turned on so that's step number one for the mac you have
to make sure that you're signed in properly and you have all of the appropriate things turned on
in order for your photographs to synchronize from your mac to your other devices
now let's go ahead and jump to my phone here and again your phone is going to be identical to your
ipad it's it's identical settings just like the ipad we're going to go into the settings
and we're going to go to the top for our icloud and we're going to go into icloud here
and to photos and again the same choices so icloud photos is at the very top it's the same thing that
we saw in preferences here for icloud photos optimize iphone storage and download and keep
originals it's the same exact thing that's referencing on the mac do you want to take
up more storage on your device or do you want to keep it all in this cloud ecosystem
and then when you need that high resolution when you touch or click on it it will download it right
then and there for you now the other option is to upload to photostream so your photo stream
just keeps your last 30 days of photographs and it will even tell you upload your last 30 days
of new photos and view them on your other devices using my photo stream photos from other devices
can be viewed in my photo stream album but not automatically saved to your library so i have
that turned on because then it will show up on my ipad my other mobile devices photo stream is just
there it keeps your last 30 days of your photographs it shows you on your other devices
so keep it on doesn't hurt anything and if you don't want it well turn it off the next option
that it has specifically for the mobile devices is upload burst photos so when you take a burst photo
it's essentially taking rapid a whole bunch of pictures in a matter of seconds that way
you can capture kind of heights high speed or that action shot so you can kind of see it in sequence
and those will also be uploaded to the photo stream as well and where you can individually
choose which photo out of that burst that you actually want to keep if you didn't do that
it's just going to upload and combine them all to what it thinks the best photo is and
then you wouldn't have those later on down the road when it synchronizes to your other devices
and the last option here is uh shared albums and again if you had it turned on on your photos
on your mac and you shared an album well it's going to be shared but if you don't have it
turned on here you're not going to see those shared albums on your on your phone so those
are the settings that you have to make sure that you have turned on that way the communication is
the same across the board on all of your devices now if we actually look at my photos on my ipad
or on my phone if i go to photos here and then we look at the computer it synchronizes the majority
of things so if i create an album on my phone it's going to be created on the on the mac so
if i look here on my mac i actually have under my albums i have a trips folder and it contains three
different kind of events i have a photo clients folder and it has all of these i have a summer
sunflowers um and those are in there and then i have a couple other random albums here that i've
created that i haven't organized and if we look at the phone here it's the same thing if i go
to trips notice here is the israel that we have here the taylor falls in california if i take a
step back i can scroll over i see the scan photos i see the work photos if i go to photo clients
it's the same thing here so it all synchronizes the same exact way if i created another album
uh here so let's do photos that's just for fun we went kayaking the other day on lake calhoun a
lot of fun so let's just say i want to take these pictures and videos and i'm going to select them
and i want to add them to an album so i'm going to do file we're going to add new album with
selection kayaking photos kayaking on lake calhoun i think that's how you spell it so
now i've created this album called kayaking on lake calhoun and i selected the photos
and it automatically put it there and in a second here if i scroll back on my phone
here it is it's already on my uh my phone there and let's say i want to put this in
my trips folder if i drag this onto trips and let go it's going to automatically move that on my
phone and now it's there so it's really really nice to be able to have that synchronization
amongst all of your photographs now what i found is i it's a lot easier to do things from the
computer side of things if you have one as far as moving albums around it's very cumbersome on here
you kind of have to almost start over on your phone on your mobile device you can create
ones but moving them around is a little bit more annoying now another thing is remember i can still
access these photographs and everything that i've done not only on my phone or my my mac computer
but if i go out to icloud.com and i sign in with my apple id and again it's going to prompt me
for my two-step verification so i'm going to touch allow on my phone type in this code
that way it's verifying that it's me i can trust it because it's my computer and if i click on
photos here we're going to see the same exact organization for all of the photos i'll see all
my albums the folder everything is going to be the same so over here on the left-hand side i have my
trips folder and here are those four uh albums within that that folder now i found there are
some limitations as far as the synchronizing for example this kayaking album that we moved into the
trips folder on the phone i can't figure out and i don't i don't think it's possible as of now maybe
in ios 14 but i actually can't move this album out of this folder remember i did it from my mac
which makes it very easy but on my my iphone or my ipad i can't actually move it out of that folder
i can touch edit in the top right and i can move the albums around in the order that they appear
but i actually can't move that album out of this entire folder so it's there are some um
little corks about it now if on my computer if i just drag this kayaking out and put it back into
my albums it's going to remove it from that folder there and if i go back to my albums i will see
that it shows up down here at the bottom now all of these albums i can organize if i touch edit
in the top i can then drag them around and this also allows me to delete them so notice there's
there's no pictures in the dji dji import so i'm going to delete that one and delete this one
now smart albums this is where i i hope i hope that in the next version of ios 14 or some of
the sequential updates afterwards that these these smart albums actually synchronize so notice here
on my phone if i go to all smart albums there's nothing in there but if we go to my computer
i have a folder called smart albums because smart albums are ways that you can quickly
find photographs based off of certain criteria and here i here are just some examples so here
is a smart album that automatically finds all of the images that i've taken with my drone
so i never have to automatically add photos to it it's just going to drag and put the photos
in there based off the criteria that i've set for that smart album same thing with some of
these other ones here's a base here's photos based off of a particular lens that i use on my camera
and so here's all the photographs for that so when i take new pictures with that lens it's
going to automatically put that picture in the smart album because that's what smart albums do
now those smart albums don't show up they they don't do that and i'm hoping that
someday apple if you're listening make that happen because that would be very very nice
now something that they did improve on is the the faces and the or i should say the people
do sync so if i go to people here on the computer or on my phone they also match up with people on
my on my mac and that didn't actually used to happen up until a little while ago so i
really enjoy this because now as i do the work here and confirm additional faces it's going to
automatically update it on my iphone and ipad so i can easily quickly find all of the photographs
based off of a certain individual in that photograph and not have to do the work double time
so that's really really handy so icloud photos really just allows you to synchronize all of
your pictures from all of your devices but also keep in mind that if you add a
photo it's going to add it if you delete a photo it's going to delete it from all those locations
and it also synchronizes everything else that we kind of walk through so i'd love to
hear how you're using your photos if you have any questions go ahead and leave a comment down below
other than that i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did hit that subscribe button tap that
little bell so that you can see new upcoming videos and until then we'll see you next time