1. How To Organize Photos Mac
2. Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Windows 10
3. Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Free
4. Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Computer
5. Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Download

Dec 14, 2017  Does your Mac's Photos library need some organization? Here are David's favorite tricks to organize your pictures. A lot of people put off organizing their Mac's photos library, which is.

• Mar 18, 2020  Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows, and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive. Before you start, be sure to.
• Sep 19, 2011  Below that, the bottom toolbar allows you to switch into full-screen mode, search, zoom, create a slideshow, check information, edit a photo, create a project, add pictures, and share your images.
• Clean Up Your Photo Collection with Free Tools. Or the same shot resized in some way by photo software into two separate files. (or wouldn't you) do again next time? Give us your.

Using the most basic digital or smartphone camera, you can shoot thousands of photos, dump them onto a computer, and then shoot thousands more. In seconds, you can edit a photo series in ways that would take days to develop in the darkroom. But our images are usually stored on our various devices, often leaving duplicates to sort through.

Compound this mess with old photos stored in albums and shoeboxes. It’s best to digitize these before time takes its toll. Click here for the easiest way to scan and save your old photos.

Organizing digital photos takes time and patience, but just follow a few simple steps, and everything should fall nicely into place.

1. Upload your photos to your computer

This should always be your first step. Even in this cloud-based era, most people have a desktop or laptop that serves as their primary computer, and you should dump your images here first.

Mac: The go-to program for Mac is simply called Photos, and it comes for free with MacOS. Photos works the same way on any Mac device you have, and the photos can also save easily to iCloud. Once you’ve attached your camera or inserted a memory card, go to Files >> Import and you should be in business. Photos downloads images directly into the program.

Windows: Unlike Mac, Windows doesn’t have a standard photo editor that everybody uses, but there are plenty of free and powerful options. Microsoft does offer their free Photos app. With Microsoft Photos, you can easily import your photos and videos from your camera or phone. You can edit your photos with a wide range of editing tools and create fun slideshows. Click here to get the Microsoft Photos app for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 now.

How To Organize Photos Mac

If you're passionate about photography, you probably love editing photos as much as you love taking them. Photoshop is one of the best editing programs out there, but it's also expensive. Here is a free alternative that doesn't skimp out on the features you want.

Related: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - favorite mobile app for photos

Related: OK Google, Pixel 2 not best smartphone camera — but close

2. Don’t be a photo hoarder

It’s a rule: Trigger-happy photographers end up with countless bad pictures. They snap away, not caring about framing or the Rule of Thirds because they’re just hoping that one of those shots ends up perfect.

Luckily, you can delete those extra shots, especially the ones that tested the exposure or are obscured by the shooter’s thumb. In fact, you should delete them, not just because they’re embarrassing because they clog your hard drive with needless images and make your albums harder to organize.

3. Use face recognition

If you’re using Apple Photos, the face recognition feature is extremely easy to use. Just go to “Faces” and find the row of “Suggested Faces.” Double-click on any of the people you see, and you can confirm or deny which faces belong to that specific friend or family member. This is an easy way to create albums based on people who are close to you.

Apple doesn’t have the monopoly on face recognition, but many Windows programs require an extra step or even an additional plugin.

Tip in a Tip: Whether you're attending a wedding, birthday party, family reunion or other special event, one of the best things is sharing the photos you've captured. Rather than email your photos back and forth to each other, click here for a much better method.

4. Add keywords and tags

Looking for a document is easy. You just type its title into your finder, and the document should appear. But images are harder to sift through. How do you make your photos searchable? Change their metadata.

Metadata is basically the hard information that is embedded in every photo, such as the date and location that it was taken. Many photos document the type of camera, lens, and exposure, as well. Adding keywords and tags make your photos easier to track down. If you’ve visited the Grand Canyon on several occasions, you can tag all of these with “Grand Canyon,” and you’ll be able to track them all down, even if they’re located in different folders.

In Photos, you just click a picture and then hit the “i” icon at the top of the screen. A small window will show you the metadata, and you can instantly add keywords and tags.

When looking at a photo file’s name, you can usually right click for “info.” This will reveal the photo’s metadata, and you can add specific tags there.

5. Create files that are easy to identify

Putting together files is an art because you have to anticipate what photos you’ll be seeking in the future. Keywords help enormously, but sometimes you want to find a whole batch of photos that aren’t exactly related.

You know yourself well, and you know how you’ll end up looking for things. You’ll likely end up putting all the photos from your Cancun vacation in a file marked “Cancun,” and if you travel a lot, the “Cancun” and “Virgin Islands” and “NYC” photos will all end up in a file called “Travel,” and so on.

6. Save the images online

Even if you have plenty of gigabytes available, you’ll want to back up the pictures that you have online. Here are a few ways.

Apple: When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. If you use all of your iCloud storage, you can buy more starting at 50GB for $0.99 a month. To see how much iCloud storage you are using, go to Apple menu > System Preferences. Then, select iCloud to view your total and available storage.

Google Drive: This virtual storage site comes with every Google account. Once you open your Gmail, find the features icon in the upper right-hand corner (it looks like nine interlocking squares) and find Google Drive. This will grant you 15 GB of space, which is the equivalent of about 1,500 high-res photos of 10 MB each. Alternatively, use Google Photos that’s specifically designed for images. When uploading select “High Quality,” and you have unlimited photo storage. These images can be no more than 16 megapixels in size.

Amazon Photos: Among the many perks of an Amazon Prime membership, you get Prime Photos, which provides unlimited photo storage. The service also offers its own app, which can help you organize your photos on the go. Remember, a Prime membership costs $99, so it’s far from free. But aside from its capacity to organize, Prime Photo is also compatible with Alexa, so you can give commands like, “Play a slideshow,” and “Show me photos of Jane.”

Tip in a Tip: Like most people, you probably signed up for Amazon Prime for one reason. Maybe it was the free shipping. Maybe it was the streaming videos or the free music. But even now, several years after Amazon Prime was founded, few people know the full breadth of their membership perks. Click here for a master list of everything you get with your Amazon Prime account.

Flickr: I’m very suspicious of Flickr. Yahoo owns the site and its been having epidemic security problems lately. But Flickr helped create the online photo phenomenon, and it’s still a high-quality venue with lots of sharing options. Flickr offers 1TB of storage, which is a colossal amount of space. Like Google Photos, you can easily create physical portraits, photos on canvas, and photo books.

More Kim Komando: One mistake people make using public Wi-Fi

More: 5 scams that are fooling even the smartest victims

What questions do you have? Call my national radio show and click here to find it on your local radio station. You can listen to the Kim Komando Show on your phone, tablet or computer. From buying advice to digital life issues, click here for my free podcasts.

We take a lot of photos with our iPhones and even DSLRs and other cameras. Photos are great for capturing memories with others, or when you just want to get a snapshot of something beautiful. Photos on Mac can help you keep all of your photos in one place, and even help you organize them.

How to add pictures and videos to albums

If you have a lot of photos and videos, one of the simplest and easiest ways to start organizing everything is to make use of albums, especially when you give them good names. And if you use iCloud Photo Library, all of your albums in Photos for Mac get synced to your iOS devices too.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.

2. Click on Photos in the sidebar, under the Library section.

3. Pick out the photos you want to add to an album, either new or existing.

   • Hold down the command key on your Mac and click to select multiple photos.
4. Right-click on your chosen photos and videos.
5. Move the cursor to Add to.

6. You can choose an existing album, or create new album.

   • If making a new album, give it a good, easy-to-remember name.

Optionally, you can make a new album at any time by clicking the + button that appears in the sidebar next to My Albums. Drag-and-drop the albums in whatever order you want to rearrange them in the sidebar.

How to organize albums and folders

When you have a lot of albums, it may be better to clean it all up by organizing albums into folders, which are like collections of albums. It's easy to do.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.

2. Either right-click on My Albums in the sidebar, or hover above and then click on the + button that appears next to My Albums.

3. Click New Folder.

4. Give your folder a name.

5. Drag the albums that you want into that folder.

How to use Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like regular albums, but smarter, obviously. They're great for helping you quickly organize images without the need of manually adding each one to an album because it's all automated.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.

2. Right-click on My Albums or click the + button that appears next to My Albums.

3. Select New Smart Album.
4. Give your Smart Album a name.

5. Choose the parameters for your Smart Album.

6. Click OK to confirm.

Smart Albums have a large number of different parameters, such as photos, faces, aperture, ISO, Live Photo, RAW, Portrait, and more. With all of these options, you can create many different Smart Albums to suit whatever it is you need.

If you're not satisfied with the Smart Album, you can always tweak the settings by clicking on the gear icon that's next to the Smart Album's title, then re-select the parameters you want to use.

Unfortunately, Smart Albums do not sync to your other devices through iCloud Photo Library, as they're only available on your Mac.

How to navigate Photos for Mac faster with the sidebar

The Sidebar in Photos is a great way to quickly jump between various areas in Photos quickly and easily. Plus, it helps you find albums that may otherwise be hidden, so this was a design choice made by Apple.

However, if you are running macOS Sierra and older, you can actually hide or unhide the sidebar as you wish.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.
2. Click on View in the menu bar.
3. Select Show Sidebar in the menu.
4. The sidebar will appear on the left side of the screen.

5. Follow the steps above to hide it (make sure Show Sidebar is unchecked).

How to navigate moments, collections, and year views in macOS Mojave and earlier

One of the coolest things about Photos is that it intelligently groups all of your photos and videos into moments, collections, and years.

This means that your photos appear in a timeline and are grouped by things like location, or even event. It's a great way to take a look back at your memories and relive those specific moments in time.

The Moments, Collections, and Year views are only available in macOS Mojave and older.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.
2. Make sure that you're in the Photos view from the sidebar.

3. Click on Photos, Moments, Collections, or Years buttons at the top of the window.

4. Click on a section of a Year to move to that Collection, or a section of a Collection to drill down into that Moment, or an item in a Moment to view that image or video in closer detail.

5. You can also use your keyboard's arrow keys to move between photos and videos in a Moment.

6. A single click on an item selects it, while a double click takes you to view it.

In the Year and Collections views, thumbnails can be small. You can click-and-hold and then drag the cursor in any direction over the thumbnails to get a larger preview. Letting go will take you directly to the image that the cursor was last on.

How to navigate through Years, Months, and Days in macOS Catalina

To replace the previous Moments/Collections/Years view, Catalina changed it to Years, Months, and Days for simplicity.

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.

2. Make sure you're in the Photos section in the sidebar.

   Source: iMore

3. Click the Years, Months, or Days buttons at the top of the window. The default view is All Photos.

4. Clicking on Years lets you see each year as a block. Double-clicking the year takes you into Months.

5. When you double-click on a Month, you'll drill down into the Days view.

How to create a new library with Photos for Mac

You can create a new library for your photos at any time with Photos for Mac. To do so, make sure that you quit Photos and reopen it with the following method to get the Library options.

1. Hold down the Option key on your keyboard.
2. Double-click on Photos on your Mac.
3. Click on the Create New button in the Choose Library window.
4. Name your Library.

5. Click OK.

You've now created a brand new Photos Library. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to migrate over photos and video, so you will need to export the content you want, and then import it back into the new library.

How to switch between Libraries in Photos for Mac

When you create a new library, you may still want to go back to a previous library for something. Fortunately, it's easy to switch between multiple libraries.

1. Make sure that Photos is not open (quit if it is).
2. Hold down the Option key on your keyboard.
3. Double-click on Photos.

4. Click on the name of the library you want to open.

Voilá! Just make sure to repeat this process each time you want to switch to a different Photo library.

Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Windows 10

How to move your Photos library to an external hard drive

If you're low on storage space on your Mac, you can just move your Photos Library to an external hard drive. Keep in mind though, that you will need to have this external drive plugged in to access your Photos Library, even if you have iCloud Photo Library enabled. And you aren't able to create a second Photos Library that has iCloud Photo Library enabled on your Mac, so be wary.

1. Launch a Finder window on your Mac.
2. Click on the Mac hard drive (Macintosh HD) in the sidebar.
3. Double-click on the Users folder.
4. Double-click on your username.
5. Double-click on your Pictures folder.

6. Click on the Photos Library file and then drag it to your external hard drive in the sidebar.

This process may take a while, depending on how big your Photos library is.

A note on reference libraries

The Photos app technically supports the management of images that aren't locally stored within its library — that is, you can keep a set of images in a folder called 'October Trip' and manage them within Photos without having to make a separate copy of them. You can do this by navigating to Photos > Preferences from the menu bar, selecting the General tab, and unchecking the 'Copy items to the Photos library' box under Importing.

That said, reference libraries won't play nicely with iCloud Photo Library users; you may run into problems when syncing, or not be able to sync at all. So if you plan on using a reference library, you'll have to opt out of iCloud Photo Library.

I also didn't have any luck getting referenced files to sync properly with Photos — I'd delete a photo, but the reference file would stay in its original location, even after deleting it from the 'Recently Deleted' folder. Not sure if that's a bug or just not how Photos wants us managing referenced photos, but worth noting.

Questions?

Sound off in the comments below!

October 2019: Updated for macOS Catalina.

Photos for Mac

Main

Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Free

Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Computer

The HybridDrive is a USB-C dock with an SSD built in

Best Way To Organize My Photo Library On Mac Download

You need more ports, right? And you probably need more storage, right? What you really need is the HybridDrive.

That means you need to check whether you have adequate storage space beforehand, otherwise the download will fail due to insufficient storage.You may also be interested in:Turn off iCloud Photo Library without Deleting Photos MacNow, if you're a Mac user, the process is slightly different. Icloud photo library windows.