Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Viewing and Organizing Your Images

If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that you won’t have fewer pictures next year—you’ll have more. In all likelihood, hundreds—if not thousands—of photos will make their way into your life within the next few months alone. That’s because digital cameras (and their prices) are better than ever, and every cell phone known to man now sports a surprisingly high-quality camera. Combine that with the selfie epidemic and the “I must photograph everything I eat” phenomenon, and you’ve got yourself a ton of photos to manage.

For most people, photo management is where the fun of digital photography abruptly ends. While it’s a blast to chronicle every moment of your life in pictures, few people enjoy organizing a honkin’ big photo collection. At best, you trudge through organizing and culling only a few pictures, but at worst you avoid it like the Tarellian plague (Star Trek, anyone?).

Happily, Photos provides many practical ways to view your image collection in neatly organized bundles, though you can organize them further into albums and folders you make yourself so that you can actually find them whenever you want. Heck, as you’ll learn in this chapter, Photos fills a slew of built-in albums automatically to save you the trouble.

In this chapter, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Photos’ different views, as well as how to select images, create albums, and use folders. You’ll also find out how ...