iCloud Shared Photo Library has been in the wild now for a few months. Here’s a walkthrough of why you should consider it and how to set it up.…
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I have been thrilled with the warm reception for the Photos Field Guide. I didn’t know what to expect, releasing it during a pandemic, but the feedback has been excellent, and customers are writing to tell me how much better they are at taking, organizing, and finding their photos.
Now that all of the transcripts and the ePub are in place, it’s time for the last call on introductory pricing for the Photos Field Guide. The price will go up to $29 later this week. If you want in on the discount price, now is the time.
The Photos Field Guide now has all closed-captioning transcripts in place, along with a written transcript of each course located below each video. Hooray!
I am also trying something new with the Photos Field Guide. I have added a PDF and ePub version of the complete transcript. This is not a written Field Guide, but instead a compiled version of the transcripts that you can download and read, if that’s your thing. It’s all available now for existing customers. Log in and go crazy.
I am happy to announce the release of the all new Photos Field Guide.
THE SHORT VERSION
122 videos, fully streamable, plus combined versions for easier download.
Nearly six hours of video tutorials.
Full coverage for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.
Everything is broken up and paced so novice to advanced users can get on board and master their photos.
Get it now with the introductory price.
THE LONG VERSION
This second edition of the Photos Field Guide contains nearly six hours of video tutorials that will up your photo game on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Over the years, organizing, editing, and sharing your photos with multiple devices have come to feel like chasing a mythical white whale. Not anymore. The Photos Field Guide delivers the goods, and this video course teaches you how. This course has in-depth video explaining how to get the most from the Photos app on the iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.
Please note the introductory price of $24 will go to $29 shortly after launch.
OVERVIEW AND LIBRARY MANAGEMENT
While Photos attempts to make your initial setup simple and easy, there can be complications. What if you have more than one existing photo library? What if you’ve got folders of photographs sprinkled all over your hard drive? All of these can be imported into Photos, but you’ve got to know the ropes. This video screencast shows you all kinds of tricks to run Photos on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Photos also can use iCloud Photo Library to make sharing photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone so much easier. The Field Guide walks you through the initial iCloud setup, including advice on which cloud storage to use and how to get the initial upload of your photo library done with as little pain and suffering as possible.
TAKING PHOTOS
While “point-and-shoot” works amazingly well, you can do so much more when taking your photos with a modern iPhone. This section includes multiple videos explaining how you can take photos from portrait mode to panoramas. This section also includes some photography basics to get you up and running.
PHOTOGRAPHY ACCESSORIES
There are some great affordable and compact accessories to improve your iPhone photos. Learn about useful tripods, lenses, and lighting sources that fit in your pocket.
PHOTOS ON THE IPHONE AND IPAD
Multiple sections and videos cover a complete soup-to-nuts treatment of how to take, organize, find, edit, and share your photos in the Photos app for iPhone and iPad.
ORGANIZING PHOTOS
Photos uses an intuitive organizational structure that lets you see your pictures grouped in multiple ways. You have thousands of photos. Photos will make it easier to find your favorites. You can even search your library so if someone says, “Hey! Quick, find me that photo of Aunt Trudy from 2004 wearing that Juicy tracksuit!”, you can deliver the goods. This stuff sounds complicated. It’s not. By the time you get to the end of this video, you’ll be able to embarrass Aunt Trudy in no time flat.
EDITING PHOTOS
Photos also has a surprisingly large toolset to make your photos better. You can do simple edits, like cropping and rotating, but you can also make complex adjustments to color and light. On the Mac, there are even more tools including a histogram, sharpening, definition, noise reduction, vignette and level adjustments. If all of this sounds like greek to you now, that’s okay. After watching the video, it won’t.
The video also explains Photos’ built-in filters and how they can be an excellent jumping-off point for making your photos look great. It also covers the semi-magical “enhance” button. If that’s not enough, there are workflows to get your photos out of the Photos app and into an external editor for further work on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
SHARING PHOTOS
With the new Photos app, there are many ways to share your images with friends and family from something as simple as an email to full-blown shared iCloud albums. This section covers all of the sharing options.
PHOTOS ON THE MAC
All those cool tricks covered in the iPhone and iPad are also fully explained and demonstrated on the Mac. Learn how to organize, find, edit, and share your photos from the Mac just as easily as you can on the iPhone and iPad.
VIDEO
Believe it or not, Photos can manage, edit, and share your video files too. This section covers the best practices for managing video files in Photos and its limited editing capabilities.
BACKUP
No photo management system is complete without a thorough backup system. The Photos Field Guide concludes explaining backup strategies and techniques. This section also demonstrates how to export images from Photos for additional backup.
THERE’S MORE!
There are more topics covered in this Photos Field Guide including a primer on digital photo formats, popular third-party photo applications, application settings for the Photos and Camera apps, and more.
I’ve been taking a lot of pictures lately, and if you looked at my iPhone, you’d see a lot of photo bloat. You know what I mean, right? You take five pictures of people in one pose when you just need one. There is nothing wrong with that. Often it turns out to be picture number 2, 3, 4, or 5 that is the real keeper. The challenge is quickly getting rid of the non-keepers.
Flic Screenshot – Why so blurry? (Click to enlarge)
For a while now I’ve been using Flic for this. Flic is a straightforward iPhone app that displays photos from your photo library and lets you quickly keep or discard them. Swipe right to keep, swipe left to trash. The app is a great idea and an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff as your sort through photos. On vacation, I would go through this app every evening and have a more-or-less pruned photo library on days where I took a lot of pictures. However, lately I’ve been unhappy with Flic. My problem is that its picture preview mode renders images a little blurry. In my haste to get through photos, I tend to forget this and more than once I found myself trashing good photos.
So I started looking for a replacement and landed on an optimistically named app, Best Photos. This app isn’t quite as simple as Flic. With Best Photos, you can flick up and down between photos and tap a trash can or heart icon to either trash or favorite image. You can also compare two photos on the screen at once. Best Photos is more powerful than Flic but still generally allows you to sort through images quickly. Most importantly, its photo renders are much better than those in Flic so I can do a better job in assessing keepers, which was entirely the point.
Because Best Photos already has you using gestures to move between images, it would be nice if they added a gesture to Trash or Favorite photos, rather than tapping an icon. Nevertheless, Best Photos is a better experience overall for me particularly because of the way it renders the images.
Best Photos Screenshot (Click to enlarge)
This problem could be solved in the Apple Photos app with a setting that turns off deletion confirmation, but I have to admit I’m not entirely certain I’d want deletion to be that easy.
Tomorrow I’ll be talking about Photos at this Orange County Mac User Group at 9AM. I know they welcome visitors so if you’ve got some time tomorrow to hang out with nerds, you’re all set.
Jason Snell’s Photos book is now complete and for sale right here. The book is a great resource for the new Photos app on the Mac. Jason spent so much time managing at Macworld that a lot of people lost track of what a good technology writer he is. Guess what? He is.
Late last year I started outlining a new MacSparky Field Guide on photo management. It was one sweet outline and I’d even started writing words. Then I got my hands on the Photos beta and realized that Photos did something pretty remarkable. Photos manages large photo libraries loads better than iPhoto ever did and the iCloud Photo Library works far better than I ever expected. I started revising the “photo management” outline until I realized this was no longer a comparison of competing photo management services and instead an in-depth manual for Photos.
At that point I scrapped the outline and instead produced a Video Field Guide explaining how to get the most from Photos. After a few months of work, here it is.
The Photos Video Field Guide is a 2.5 hour screencast that teaches you how to install and use Apple’s Photos Application and sync all of your photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone using iCloud Photo Storage. Managing your photos with multiple devices has, over the years, come to feel like chasing a mythical white whale. Not anymore. Photos delivers the goods and this screencast teaches you how.
Topics Include:
While Photos attempts to make your initial setup simple and easy, there can be complications. What if you have more than one existing photo libraries? What if you’ve got folders of photographs sprinkled all over your hard drive? All of these can be imported into Photos but you’ve got to know the ropes. This video screencast shows you all tricks to run Photos on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Photos also can use iCloud Photo Library to make sharing photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone easier than anyone ever thought possible. The Video Field Guide walks you through the initial iCloud setup, including advice on which cloud storage to use and how to get the initial upload of your photo library done with as little pain and suffering as possible.
Photos uses an intuitive organizational structure that lets you see your pictures grouped by years, collections, moments, and individual photos. This Video Field Guide shows you exactly how it works and sprinkles in several power tricks to make managing your library even easier. Once you’ve sorted that out, Photos also has options to create custom and smart albums, where the program seeks out photos for you pursuant to your instruction.
Photos also has specialized libraries that can identify the faces of your family and friends. You can even search you library so if someone says, “Hey! Quick! Find me that picture of Uncle Ralph from April 2007 wearing that ballerina tutu!”, you can deliver the goods. This stuff sounds complicated. It’s not. By the time you get to the end of this video, you’ll be able to embarrass Uncle Ralph in no time flat.
Photos also has a surprisingly large toolset to make your photos better. You can do simple edits, like cropping and rotating, but you can also make complex adjustments to color and light. On the Mac there are even more tools including a histogram, sharpening, definition, noise reduction, vignette and level adjustments. If all of this sounds like greek to you now, that’s okay. After watching the video it won’t.
The video also explains Photos built in filters and how they can be an excellent jumping off point for making your photos look great. It also covers has the semi-magical “enhance” button. If that’s not enough, there are workflows to get your photos out of the Photos app and into an external editor for further work on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
With the new Photos app, there are many ways to share your images with friends and family from something as simple as an email to full-blown shared iCloud albums. This section of the video covers all of the sharing options from the Mac and iOS. The Photos Video Field Guide also demonstrates how to make books, calendars, and cards from the Photos application on the Mac.
Believe it or not, Photos can manage your video files too. This section covers the best practices for managing video files in Photos and its limited editing capabilities.
No photo management system is complete without a thorough backup system. The Photos Video Field Guide concludes explaining backup strategies and techniques. This section also demonstrates how to export images from Photos for additional backup.
The screencast is two and a half hours and fully bookmarked. You can buy it now for $9.99.
Did you ask for a sample video? I thought so. Here you go.
It has been a busy few days for all of us Apple nerds. With all the news about the Apple Watch and the new MacBook, you may have missed that we had an operating system update that included the public release of the new Photos application. This is a big deal.
For several years now, the iPhoto model of photo management has been broken. There are a lot of reasons for this including the fact that digital cameras have bigger sensors and make massively larger files and, for most of us, that digital camera is now in our pockets at all times and we are taking a lot more of those bigger pictures.
Regardless, the old days where you would take your camera home and plug it into your computer are long gone. With the release of the Photos application, Apple is attempting to drag us into the future with cloud-based photo management.
Prior to a few days ago, Apple developed two photography applications, iPhoto and Aperture. iPhoto was for the unwashed masses and Aperture was a more specialized tool for photographers and “prosumers”. They all were based on the traditional model of local management of the photographs.
Now we’ve just got Photos. While photos can use your Mac as the central location for your photographs, the clear thrust is cloud-based photo management. It ties in with the iCloud Drive and allows you to upload all of your photos to Apple’s servers and then be able to access them from any of your devices. No longer should you have to decide which photos make the cut to get onto your iPhone or iPad. Instead, all of your photos are everywhere. They pull this off by only displaying small thumbnails on your storage restricted mobile devices. If you open up an image on your iPhone or iPad, it will appear a little blurry at first and then quickly sort itself out.
Part of this new vision is the idea that you can manage and adjust your photos from any platform and have it nearly simultaneously show up on any other platform. This is an excellent goal. I have been using the Photos beta for some time and I can tell you that sitting on my couch and sorting through photographs on my iPad and making deletions and small changes only to watch them show up on my Mac and iPhone almost immediately is a fantastic user experience and long-overdue.
The news here is that this is not hypothetical. It has been working for me. It worked during the beta and it’s now working on version 1.0. My big concern was that once Photos got released to the public with broad distribution, the servers would get slammed and this functionality would grind to a halt or, at least, get really slow. That’s why I waited a few days before publishing this.
Yesterday I installed the updates to my wife’s computer and initiated the iCloud upload of her 36,000 photo library. This is a long overdue upgrade since iPhoto had become virtually unusable with her library size. She would boot it up and go get a cup of coffee.
The application took her library in stride and scrolling through the library on her three-year-old MacBook Pro is no problem at all. I expected this because the Photos is just so much better at handling a large library than iPhoto.
The big question still remained what will happen to the servers when everybody stars uploading a lifetime worth of photos into them. With respect to my wife’s computer, it has been slowly uploading her photos now for 24 hours and it’s about halfway done. She won’t actually get the benefits of this new cloud-based photosystem until that process is done but it looks like we’re only a day away from that being the case.
Another moment of truth for me was how would this impact my existing photos library. I’ve got a feeling my wife isn’t the only person currently jamming thousands of photos into the Apple servers. Will that slow down to my already established Photos library? The answer is no.
I sat on my couch this morning and had my laptop and my iPad open simultaneously. As quickly as I was deleting, favoriting, and modifying images in one device, they showed up on the other. These photos are all large file sizes and this demonstration of cloud-based syncing is impressive coming from Apple. After we’ve all made Apple the cloud services whipping boy for so long, I’m actually surprised more people aren’t making a bigger deal about how stable Photos cloud sync is just a few days after launch.
Another clear design goal of the new Photos app is to make editing easier. Again, the tools are simpler and while the edit tools don’t rise to the level of Aperture, they are also better than iPhoto. It looks like Apple is clearly aiming for a middle ground.
There is a lot more to learn about the Photos application and I’m going to be producing more content on the Photos app in the near future here at MacSparky and the Mac Power Users. For the meantime, I would recommend that you start experimenting with the application as well. So long as Apple can keep up with the server load, Photos is a substantial improvement for photo management.
For so long, photo management between our Macs and iOS devices has felt like the mythical white whale. We are all taking more pictures than ever and at the same time using multiple devices, making photo management a nightmare. It didn’t help that iPhoto and Aperture lingered, feeling like relics of a bygone era and every independent company that tries to come up with an innovate web-based solution seems to fold up before it gets any momentum.
However, at WWDC in 2014, Apple promised they are taking photos to the cloud and they really get it this time. They even explained they were working on a new photos app for the Mac, called, appropriately, Photos that would let us seamlessly work between devices.
Then there was silence.
In fact, there was so much silence that I began to wonder if there was a problem. Today, the most recent developer build of Yosemite showed up with the Photos app for Mac, ready for testing. I’m so eager to see this work (and so tired of iPhoto) that I loaded it up and, after making appropriate backups, pressed the button to move my iPhoto library into Photos. I’m not going to go into great detail about it. Others have. I will say however, that the app feels pretty good for a beta and already runs much faster on my Mac than iPhoto ever did with the exact same library.
Am I feeling a glimmer of hope?
There is going to a public beta at some point and nobody outside of Cupertino has tested it enough yet to really render judgment but right now it feels like Apple has a contender for solving the photo problem.
