Photos: A Take Control Crash Course

Introduction

In 2002, Apple introduced iPhoto as a way for us to save our photos on our Macs inside a “digital shoebox.” At the time, I’d owned a digital camera for three months, and had only a few hundred digital images. Over the years, as my photo library grew, Apple revised iPhoto, always trying to stay in front of the onslaught of thousands of digital photos accumulated over a lifetime—at least the lifetime of my two children.

By 2014, enough was more than enough. Apple decided it needed to start from scratch and ditch both iPhoto and the professional-level photo tool it had introduced in 2005, Aperture. It chose to replace them both with a single application, which would be called—in the prosaic style favored by Apple for its iOS apps—Photos. ...