5 Minute Photos Weekend Digest #17

SHARED WITH YOU • BIG PICTURE PHOTO EDITS • KEYWORDS REVISITED

SHARING IS CARING

Messages is without a doubt the handiest way to share a photo or video in the Apple Photos ecosystem. Three taps and you’re done. That sunset appears in your friend’s Messages feed.

A good practice when you receive a Messages attachment is to decide right then if it’s a keeper, and if so add it to your Library with the Save icon next to it. Evergreen (keeper) photos are easier to find in your Photos Library and get indexed by People & Pets, Location, and other features. Otherwise they can get lost in your Messages feeds and just take up unnecessary storage space.

A handy way to know if you have unsaved photos and videos still in Messages is by using Shared With You.

You access Shared With You in the Messages settings. Turn it on for Photos. Then those photos that are still sitting in your Messages feed will show with a tiny Messages bubble in the lower left corner of shared photos in the Library view.

You can also go to the filters at the top of the Library view and choose the Shared With You filter to limit your view to the pictures in your Messages feed that haven’t been saved into your Library. Once you do they will stop showing in the Shared With You filter, but will be tagged with who shared them. And they show up in Recently Saved.

Once you’ve saved the photos you want to keep you can delete them from Messages and save storage space.

WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER SCREEN

The foundation of good photo management and quashing picture overwhelm is regularly decluttering your photo collection. Back in the days of film photography, photo management was an additive process; you examined tiny images on a contact sheet to pick which photos were worthy of printing. Today, digital photography organizing turns that around. We start with a collection of finished pictures and have to weed out the rejects.

A common challenge, though, is that trying to judge an image at ‘original’ size doesn’t always deliver the best result. Even with practice, many of the negatives I chose to print were just not that good as 8x10 prints. And although the iPhone displays have stunning quality, decluttering in Library View isn’t much better. When you are making decisions on what to keep or delete in a collection that will live for decades, it’s worth seeing those photos as large as possible.

The logical choice is on your Mac. Either in Apple Photos or on iCloud.com (particularly handy for PC users). An alternative is AirPlay from your iPhone to your smart TV or opening up the Photos App on Apple TV if you have it.

Seeing your pictures large not only reveals all the amazing detail but will highlight images that take on new meaning at size. Ones you might have just skimmed by on your iPhone.

Now of course there are clutter photos that don’t need the benefit scale to delete or move out of Photos, but when passing judgement on the real memories, treat yourself to a big screen experience.

Photo by Jason D on Unsplash

WHAT’S IN A KEYWORD?

Once upon a time, Keywords were king. When most digital photo collections lived free range in desktop folders, Keyword tagging was an easy way to add context and searchibility to images beyond the native file structure and naming.

Keywording is still a powerful tool for corporate and institutional databases, as well as genealogy for family collections, but over the years photo management software has changed the equation for everyday users by building in features that replace much of what Keywords offer. The reality is that the viewing software has become as much a part of the photo experience as the images themselves, and most of it is automatic, eliminating the need to manually enter anything.

But interestingly enough, Apple is introducing Keywords on the iPhone in the coming iOS 27 version of Photos. Even on the threshold of A.I?

What does that mean for everyday photographers like us?

Two things, I think.

First, Keywords offer an alternative to Albums. We are now over 2 decades into the iPhoto/Photos experiment and I’ve seen Libraries with Albums numbering in the hundreds. To the point that the Albums create more clutter than the photos. There ought to be curated collections that deserve to exist for occasional reference, but don’t need to be user facing all the time like Albums. On-demand Albums, if you will.

Second, Apple Photos is not your father’s image database anymore. It’s no longer the ‘intuitive’ experience it once was, as the iOS 18.5 upgrade proved. In many ways Photos has become as capable and full featured as other photo management software, and if you don’t have the sharp eyesight of a Millennial you can miss whole tabs of media.

What I’m seeing is a reverse migration of enthusiasts from Adobe and others who want a simpler photo experience but have found features like Keywording and Star Ratings (also coming to Photos) useful.

Keywords functionality is still in beta form, so we don’t know what the final version will look like, but it hopefully will include some type of hierarchy and batch addition on mobile. That would make all the Aperture survivors and Lightroom migrants feel at home.

Regardless, It will be interesting to see how the intersection of Siri AI and a more robust Photos feature set reshape the user experience. I haven’t spent any time with my Keywords in years. Yet I have 237 of them in my Mac’s Keyword Manager. (Command + K on your Mac). All but a handful of those are obsolete because of object recognition, facial ID, Trips, maps, and captions.

But I think it opens up new opportunities; those things that are universal across my timeline and difficult to search on in other ways. I see auto enthusiasts, birders, collectors of all kinds, small businesspeople, artists, educators, and more. Like a visual list of some specific content. Because it all starts on the iPhone and being able to quickly tag a photo from a standard queue of keywords would be handy.

Are you a fan of Keywords? How would you use them? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.