How to Organize Photos on a Mac with Apple Photos

are you looking to get your photos organized on your Mac but you just don't know where to start or maybe you're tired of wasting time and you want to make sure you're doing it the right way today I'm going to show you how to use the photos app to get your photos under [Music] control hi I'm Molly bartelt I own pixology where we've been helping people feel confident and motivated in saving their family photos we've been doing it for over 10 years now I love using the Apple photos app on my Mac but it is only just one of the tools I use in saving all of my family memories and if you'd like to know more about the system that we teach and use here at pixology see the description below and there's a link to download a road map and you can learn more about all the other things going on with the family pictures besides your current Digital Collection that you're working with a your Mac today we're going to cover why people use the Apple photos app and then I'm going to give you a quick tour I'm going to show you how to organize using the folders and albums feature in the app and then I'm going to talk about working with the photo meta data there's a bunch of reasons why people use the photos app it's free and it comes on your Mac and also the app will connect your phone to your computer the photos app app will sync your pictures back and forth through iCloud if you need to check these settings you'll do that on your iPhone make sure iCloud photos is turned on and the same on your Mac you can organize and edit your pictures on your Mac while knowing that your work is backed up in iCloud there are more photo management options out there programs that you could install on your Mac if you want to know more about what's out there watch this video next in the link bottom line the photos app it's just convenient it's right there on your computer now we're going to take a tour of the photos app on the Mac we're in the library view of my photos app on my Mac you can see I have not a lot of family photos showing here and that's one thing I do hear from my clients and people who watch this YouTube channel is how can they get their Library view to be you know better more family photos and unfortunately the library view really just is that Dumping Ground for all the pictures that we take and our family photos kind of get lost in the mix I know I've got pictures of my son here from a solo that he did but there's a lot of work and photos for information you really do want to make sure to go through and delete pictures from here when you can and clean that up like I know these were just things that I was sharing with the staff member so I could delete those and you can just right click on it and click delete so the library view is interesting because at the bottom of the library view you see how many photos and videos you have you'll also see that you are synced with iCloud which means that your photos from your phone will come to your computer if you're not sure about that you can go to above at the top the photos area here and click settings and make sure that iCloud photos is on you can choose whether to have your original save to the Mac or just have your Mac be optimized and the full resolution pictures are up in iCloud so in the library view you have at the top here the ability to change to years months and days and all photos then when you select a photo we'll just click on one here across the top to you can see this I icon this is the information uh icon and this is so handy because it tells you the date it was taken and you'll see the caption and keyword this is how you can edit that information if you select a few photos and do the I it will give you you know information about the batch of them also across the top if you click a picture or two or more you can share you can add them to your favorites and you can rotate them now down the leftand side there's just different views that apple offers you there's memories which are system generated you know using AI to give you videos and slideshows of pictures shared with you so these are the pictures that people have shared with me and it's kind of nice I guess to know but you could get yourself a little mixed up as to what's being saved where so I don't focus on this too much other than to make sure that these photos are saved to my library if they weren't they would have a little button here that says save to library then there's people and pets this is great because it does the facial recognition for you you can confirm more names and just recently they added pets so we've got Tilly and Brody and Sydney and Charlie in here which is crazy that our pets are being recognized by Apple again that is artificial intelligence working for you your photos also probably if they're taken with your phone have a location so it's kind of fun when you can see all the different places that you've been favorites obviously the pictures that you have hearted recent is interesting because this is what's showing you that's been most recently added to your photos and I'll show you how that works in a second we're going to go next to iCloud links and these are links that people have shared with you or that you've shared with other people and these links are only available for 30 days so you do want to get pictures out of there if these are important to you like these came from my friend Tammy I don't know for whatever reason all these years ago I didn't save all of these pictures so let's just say I wanted we'll just take this picture I think it's Philadelphia and right now I'm SEL and you can see at the top it says save one photo so I'll save this photo and now it's in my collection and I could do that for several if I wanted when I go to recents now that photo I was just recently added but the date Taken on it if I click that I button was 2017 so if I go to the library view it's going to be in 2017 it's not going to be you know today so sometimes people get mixed up when they save pictures to their apple photos because it's a recent photo but not a currently taken photo anyway there's an area here for imports and then there's something new called duplicates like the photos app now will identify duplicates for you which is great I'm not going to spend any time on this but it is interesting I noticed here this picture is 2.9 megabytes and this one's only 200 26 kilobytes depending on how photos are shared with you the size can be different and you want to be a little bit aware of which pictures you're saving then there's recently deleted which I can't believe that we now have to use our thumb print or our fingerprint or facial recognition on our phone to see our recently deleted pictures but it might help you recover something that you were looking for if you accidentally think you you deleted something you didn't want to next up is the albums section there's three areas here the media types these are system generated albums based on the type of photo that you took and could be useful sometimes I really like going to videos cuz I have so many and sometimes I need to delete them some of them anyway so that's media types next up is shared albums people can really get mixed up with shared albums because families will share to one album over the course of years and sometimes you know people accidentally share a photo twice and you can't really tell which pictures you shared versus which ones someone shared with you so I try to steer clear of this and if you have a lot of shared photos like in these albums I think you might want to check out the link I have in the description below because it can be be kind of tricky to get it cleaned up we once had a client who had about five or six albums from different years and there was thousands and thousands of pictures in there actually was a lot of duplicates so be careful with shared albums next is my favorite area my albums these are the albums that you may have organized somehow on your phone or on your computer or if you upgraded I photo library to photos you're going to have a mess in here as well I like to point out that on the left hand side here there's a little like carrot symbol you can click that and now you'll see all of your albums on the side here too that can be kind of handy so a few things about the my albums view is first of all you can see at the top what you have I have 34 albums in one folder albums you can tell they're albums because they are a full Square picture and folders here down on the bottom you can see that it's a full square with four squares inside of it so inside the screenshots folder I have shopping and text messages then lastly there's my projects and the my projects could be like slideshows Books A lot of these require another app to be installed on your computer mostly if I do anything I'm making a slideshow which is really easy and that's pretty much the walk through of you know the the user interface as it were now let's talk about using the folders and albums to get your pictures under control I teach that you don't want to be scrolling through like hundreds of albums and depending on how long you've had your photos Library this can be quite a mess so the first thing that you can do to just make things a little easier to look at is to sort your elbow s now I teach to sort by name because we have a lot of times we put the the year first in the album name okay so now you can see the organization method here we have you know a trip to Maryland comes before the 2021 family photos and on and on so that's the first thing to do get it sorted so you kind of know what you're looking at you may have albums that are completely un necessary and you can delete those you like typ orama these are just Graphics that I made in a a program you might see Instagram I have an Instagram one and if you don't need it you can delete it you just right click and delete the album so that's the first thing you can do is clean things up you want to use a folder structure to help you kind of categorize your album so you don't have to scroll through so many so the first thing I like to do is have a a folder for a decade and in order to add a folder you can click the plus button over under my albums and just click folder and then we'll type in 20 t0 photos so this folder is going to hold all of my albums that are from 2010 to 2019 so you can click on a couple of them and just drag them over until the folder is kind of enlarged a little and drop it in so just like that I can take all these you know 2010s albums and drop them in the folder folders are really awesome to get things kind of grouped together I do want to mention that any of the work that you do on your computer in the photos app will show up in the photos app on your phone and it's wonderful to see that organization on your phone when you're done work photos so let's make a folder for work photos and now I'm going to go back and we're going to find some of our work photos so 3D printing is one I have some newspaper articles career stuff there pixology and wso photos those were all work related and so is Imaging mobile so now I use the command key to select these albums and then I'm just going to drag them up into the work photos folder and now you can kind of see things coming together a little better here in the screenshots folder this is a folder I like to call it you know photos for information and you might want to have one of these as well I actually have an album for it already we'll just drag that one in there and you can see how you can work with your folders and kind of clean things up and notice every time I add something new it's kind of mixing up my organization right the alphabetical is not working so we can go to view and do that sort again or we can even rightclick on my albums and click sort by name so you have a couple options one last thing I want to point out to you is your pictures can be in multiple albums and that can be kind of annoying if you're exporting and trying to figure out what photos you have you'll have to figure out a way to deal with that but it is really helpful to know which pictures aren't in an album yet and that's my album over here not in album and you can see it over here on the left hand side not in an album this Cog wheel indicates that it is a smart album so if you want to add this album in your library you're going to click smart album and then you're going to click album is not any and then you can click okay and you probably want to put something that tells what it is not Untitled smart album so I'll just put not in an album which is what my current album already is so hopefully that will make sense for you and then you know let's just say these two are work photos for sure so if I go to my work photos folder on the left hand side I'm not clicking into it I'm clicking the carrot and there's pixology I can drag these two photos over to pixology and now it's out of my knot in an album folder speaking of smart albums I know there are tips out there to make a smart album to show you you know all your photos from 2023 the challenge with this is if you do that you're going to get all those screenshots and photos for information that are not part of your family collection so that's why I usually create just a regular album and I label it 2019 or whatever it is and then I drag my pictures into a regular album versus a smart album totally your preference that's what I wanted to show you in the organization options that you have you can use folders you can use this not in an album and those couple of things will really help you straighten up the my albums area and come back to your my albums area and and work on it if you're using the photos app for your collection it's good to be in there routinely so you keep up with everything so that's all about folders and albums what do you think so far is this helpful have you picked up a few things that will get your pictures managed leave a comment below i' love to hear uh what you're thinking and if you have other questions now we're going to talk about working with your photos metadata this is the information that's attached digitally to your picture we have some terminology differences Apple just likes to use the terms they use so we're going to be referring to date captured which is the date Taken very important piece of information there's keywords some programs call them tags and then there's captions and some programs call that comments or descriptions so let's look at how we edit this before I talk about the editing the metadata I want to just show you a couple other things here in the The View that we're looking at this photo that I've selected you can see like a tag on there that means that photo has a keyword attached to it already in this photo you can see some sliders and it's a location pin and this tells me that this photo has been edited and it also has location information on it you can have these different pieces of information including even the name of the photo underneath it you would want to go to view and then down to meta data and select titles keywords edited file type favorite location you can add all of that and that might help you you know kind of know what you're looking at now in terms of metadata I really teach to just look at three pieces of metadata so I'm going to just select these three since it's a easy one and I'm going to rightclick and get info you can also click the I button up at the top so I'm going to get info and now you see I have three photos selected and I'm going to add a caption and this is just first sort and inventory for one of our projects so that we keep track of the different stages of our project so I'll type that in there and I'm going to add a keyword and I'll just put print organizing in case I ever wanted to you know go get all my print organizing pictures so that's how you can add a caption and a keyword changing the date is a little bit different this is a good example here this is a screenshot of my dad playing the banjo from like 198 nine or something like that it's got the wrong name I could do all sorts of things in fixing that but we want to change the date to change the date of a photo or several photos you can select more than one you're going to go up to image at the top and click adjust date and time so now I can change this this is in the summer up north the July 1st is fine and I'm going to put 19 uh 89 and I'm going to click adjust picture got put way up at the beginning so I it says 1889 I think I think that's why it's at the beginning cuz this one this photo here I changed the date to be 1912 so sometimes you you got to be careful that you actually edit the right date so again I'm going to go up to image adjust date and time yeah I think it thinks it's like the year 89 so let's type in 1989 adjust and now it's in with you know with some other pictures possibly from that time frame so you'll notice you know Apple photos will show the range of your earliest dated photos so that's how you can change the the date and the time and that's a little bit about the metadata how are you feeling are you still overwhelmed it's understandable there's so many moving parts and sometimes you just got to get started and work at it and it comes a little bit more familiar as you do it if you do want to chat with me I love doing research calls on the challenges that consumers face when they're trying to organize their photos see my link below in the description to schedule a time and if you also need something more powerful to tackle duplicates in your photos app you probably want to consider photo sweeper and I have this video that explains that program all right that's it for now thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you the next [Music] time

Channel: Pixologie - The Photo Estate Company

Views: 6,153

Keywords: how to organize photos, easy photo organization, How to Organize Photos on a Mac with Apple Photos, Organizing Photos, Mac, Apple Photos, Photos App, Photo Organizing, Photo Management, How to Organize Photos on a Mac, digital photos, iPhone, tutorial, tips, Pixologie, Mollie Bartelt, Organize Photos on a Mac with Apple Photos, metadata, digital memories, how to, Mac Photos, organize photos, Organize Photos on a Mac, how to organize photos on mac, photo organization

Id: i4R1zVmLBdM

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024