About four years ago, Apple launched Photos on the Mac. This new picture organizing tool shared the design and function with the app of the same name on iOS devices. While transitioning users from iPhoto, development and support of this older app halted.

For most users, Photos is a great way to store and edit photos captured by iPhones and other cameras, identify people and places, organize pictures into albums, and share them with others.

Here are some best practices for using Photos so you will have more space, more clarity, and more connection to your art, work, and special memories!

Photos Library

The Photos application is a container that enables you to view and interact with your pictures, but they are not actually stored in the application. Rather, your pictures are stored in a Photos Library.

This bundle also contains a database of additional information related to the pictures. If you edit a picture, the Library holds onto the unmodified original as well.

Photos < Albums < Folders

Apple intends that you use Photos to organize your pictures rather than doing so manually using folders in the Finder. You can easily create albums and arrange pictures inside them, just like physical photo albums.

However, you can store a single photo in multiple albums without making a copy. This is one value of the Photos Library database.

Additionally, you can create folders to consolidate multiple albums. For example, I created a folder for four albums containing photos I took at Isabella Freedman. My client Sallie has a Travel folder in which she has organized the albums of her trips to various destinations.

People & Places

Photos has face detection and face recognition features built in. This means it can see the faces of people and some other animals in your pictures and differentiate among them. With some training, you can help Photos improve its recognition of the faces you capture a lot.

The app also reads location data stored in pictures you take with a smartphone or other camera with GPS capability. This way you can see where in the world you have taken pictures and zoom in on them.

Titles, Keywords & Search

There are additional ways to organize and find pictures in your library. You can name your pictures by entering a Title. To create a verbal association between pictures across albums, you can assign Keywords. This is especially useful for pictures taken in a geographic region or near a landmark not captured by the specific location.

These and other metadata are visible (and editable) in the Info window. Click the ⓘ on the toolbar or press Command+I. The window is dynamic and will show info on whichever picture(s) are selected.

Any of the metadata you store about a picture is searchable and Photos provides some powerful search tools. Try typing in the Search field on the toolbar and see what kinds of results come up.

iCloud Photos

If you use an iPhone to take pictures, you might not have enough space on your phone for your whole library. iCloud Photos can save you a lot of stress importing your pictures to Photos on your Mac and having enough free space on your iPhone to take more.

iCloud stores the full-resolution versions and lets you choose whether to store the same on each device or optimized versions if you’re short on space. You just need to pay for enough iCloud storage.

If you need to edit or share a picture, Photos downloads the original. Any edits are uploaded to iCloud before replacing it with another optimized copy.

While iCloud Photos is an acceptable remote backup of your pictures and videos, I recommend having enough storage capacity on your Mac to store your full-resolution photo library locally, too. This way, your Time Machine backup will also contain the same original files.