Apple Photos On Vacation - Part 3
BUILDING THE VACATION PROJECT
In Parts 1 & 2 we went through the creating and gathering steps for a project to document/celebrate/remember that special vacation. Be it a long weekend at the beach or three weeks in a distant land, vacation is a different reality than our every day and deserves to be the thoughtful subject of a project to enjoy and share.
If everything has gone to plan, you have a rich collection of photos and videos from the designated Camerapeople and your own Photos Library. Now you can forge ahead with your project - photo book, slideshow, online gallery, etc. - and get it happening.
Your Project in the Photos Library
What’s important to understand is that you are adding all these shared photos and videos to your Apple Photos Library, right alongside your own photos. That’s no big deal, because we’re going to identify them in their own albums, but for the duration of the project those photos will also show up in your camera roll/Library view.
Just know that it’s temporary. Once the travel project is complete, you have the option of deleting some or all of them from your collection if you want.
Late Entries
Now, in a perfect world, you would have already collected those photos before the vacation was over, but it’s not likely that happened. People get caught up in the vacation or want to edit their selections when they get home. So you may have some photos that showed up in person via AirDrop, but more likely you got downloads from iCloud Links, and attachments to Messages or Email. These all work in different ways; you just have to pull them together.
iCloud Links - This is the simplest and most trouble free way to get images, especially in large batches. The sender can include the metadata - location, camera info, - and editing history for each original-sized image. You have all the picture information you would have if they were your own. The link lets you review images before download and you can import one or all of the referenced photos right into your Photos Library. Because it is a direct download link, there’s nothing taking up room on your device except a single copy of each image.
Messages - Photo and video attachments show up with a Save icon alongside. Tap the icon and the photos are saved to the Photos Library. Once saved, the icon goes away, but the attachments stat in the Messages cache and need to be deleted to reclaim that storage space. Deleting them from Messages does not delete them from the Library if you’ve saved them there.
Email - Email attachments work differently depending on your email app. On the Apple Mail app you get the option to Save to either Apple Photos or to a Folder on your device. We’re choosing the Photos Library. The concern with emailed photos is that the sender needs to be sure they are sending the images at “Actual Size.” Because attachments tend to clog up email storage, the sender’s mail app may default to a “small” size email that saves space. This means that the image can’t be used large on a photo book page or wall print. It might look blurry even on a slideshow. Be sure to request Actual or Original sized images from the sender.
And there’s one other option.
What about Shared Albums?
Shared Albums - Shared Albums seems like a logical way to share photos with you, but there’s a catch. When you create a Shared Album, you are creating a stand-alone web gallery of down-sized images. It is designed for an optimal internet experience, not as a way to share original image files. So images posted to a Shared Album are printable to about 5”x 7” when downloaded and printed in a photo book. Slightly larger as a photo print. It’s easy to overlook that until you’re in the middle of making a 10”x 12” photo book with full page pictures and you get error messages about undersized photos. The good news, though, is that images downloaded from a Shared Album work just fine for digital slide shows.
The other benefit of Shared Albums is that you can collect images in one place. By making a Shared Album and inviting everyone on the trip to contribute their photos, you both remind them to send photos and create a simple way to send them. Be sure to give everyone permission to add and comment on photos. And you only need to pick one feature photo of your own to create the Shared Album. You will be adding your own pictures to the project Album right from your own library so no need to add yours to the Shared Album too. You would just be downloading down-sized duplicates of what you already have.
Making the Project
Now, as mentioned, all these photos are going to show up in your Photos Library chronologically. Be sure that your Library is set to “Sort by Date Captured” and all these photos will show up along with yours during the dates of this trip. That makes it easy to select the entire group and add them to a new Album for the project. Name it for the event or something like Vacation Project. This is where we’ll cull the collection down to a nice story for the project.
Declutter - Your first Album task is to remove any unnecessary images. Hopefully your Camerapeople will have removed any obvious problem photos before sending, but they may have just included everything including out-of-focus, inside of pockets, feet, and multiple takes of the same thing. You’ll also have multiple views of the same event because everyone in the group took pictures of those running bulls.
You get to pick and choose the best.
Your task here is to edit down to the core story with some supporting images. That means:
Who was there?
Where was it?
What happened?
The story is yours, of course, to tell, but to me it should be complete enough that someone can pick up the photo book, view the video, or flip through the photos and understand the who/where/what on their own.
The process is simply opening the Album you’ve made of the collection and removing everything that doesn’t do that.
Remove the truly unnecessary photos.
Remove the unnecessary moments.
Remove the extra/similar/alternate view images.
Now you have a rough draft of a story. You can start picking out the best images that move the story forward. The ones that make you smile or spark a memory. Pare it down to the basics.
When deleting in an Album you can DELETE from the whole Library or REMOVE from the Album, leaving the photo in the Library. Make sure you’re clear about which you want to do.
As a rule of thumb, aim for 200 or fewer images in the final project Album. That translates into about a 60 page book at 3+ images per page or a 10-12 minute video. A weekend getaway will be fewer. A month in France will be more. But remember that too big a book or too long a video will lose the viewer so be picky about which images really deserve to make the cut.
The last step is fine tuning. You may want to reorder the images to clarify the story. Maybe you came back to a place more than once, but it makes sense to keep those photos together. Maybe a random shot of Coney Island should lead off your section about New York.
In Albums, unlike the Library view, you can manually order your images. Play around with sequence as you would with paragraphs in an essay. A simple change of position can really improve the story effect.
Once you’ve created an Album that really serves the experience, you are ready to create it. With Apple Photos you have two clear choices.
You can use the Project extensions to build your product right in Apple Photos, or you can export the images to a folder in the Finder where you can upload them to an app or service.
Apple Projects gives you a more seamless experience and easy ways to make color edits during the process, but you are limited to the vendors who have written extensions for Apple Photos. This is the evolution of Apple Books that everyone loved back in iPhoto. In Photos, Apple has enabled vendors to make extensions that plug into the Photos Library and offer even more variety than before.
External options offer a variety of book makers, video apps, and interesting products at the expense of some extra steps and often a steeper learning curve. If you choose to export your photos to the Finder, be sure to select all and use the File > Export choice in the Photos Menu. Drag and Dropping photos to your desktop will give you reduced quality images.
I recommend starting with a simple project to familiarize yourself with the task. Choose 10-12 photos from your Album and right-click on one image to “Create . . .” and choose a book. You will be prompted to download an extension. I recommend Mimeo or Motif as a good place to start, and play with building a small book. You don’t have to order it, just practice.
If you want a Slideshow, try that.
Once you understand the steps, you can go on the internet and look for other providers that may offer products either through Apple or as standalone services. The workflow is pretty much the same for all books, or slideshows, or wall art, or whatever.
Once you get the hang of making Travel projects, you’ll be hooked. Having a visual reminder of your travels to revisit and share is the perfect closure for a special experience with family and friends.
That lasts forever.
Photos Projects Workshop for Tahoe - macOS 26
If you are interested in an online workshop for making Projects - book, slideshow, calendars, cards - in the newest version of Apple Photos, sign up here for announcements when it becomes available. Once macOS Tahoe releases next month and I see the final Photos changes, I will schedule the workshop and make announcements. There is no obligation and you can unsubscribe from that list whenever you want.
