Are you pre-flighting your photo collection?

HOW TO DODGE THE DOOMSCROLL IN LESS THAN A MINUTE

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

I know people who pick up their home before the cleaners come but will walk into a social gathering with their photo library looking like a digital dumpster of random images. It’s the every day equivalent of showing up at a meeting with your presentation deck half done.

When the conversation gets to sharing and recent events, they have to scroll through a thicket of screenshots, selfies, and downloads to find the picture of interest.

Not only is this frustrating in the moment, but it fosters the general feeling of overwhelm that is on the lips of every client I help.

Sharing your pictures should be photography’s payoff, not the chore.

Sharing your pictures should be photography’s payoff . . .

In flight school, we learn about pre-flighting your airplane before takeoff. A quick check to of the controls and instruments to be sure you’re ready to fly. Then adjust the altimeter, lower the flaps, and go.

We can do the same thing in the new Apple Photos Home Screen on your iPhone. Doing a pre-flight of your own will put those special photos right at your fingertips and change your sharing experience forever. No more doomscrolling to find “that” photo or having your friends get off-track rummaging through your Photos Library.

So what’s the trick?

Consider your audience

If it’s a regular meetup, then you’re likely going to share some recent photos - a trip, an event, new member of the family, first steps, graduation, and so on. That’s pretty easy because those photos are recent and generally easy to find, but we can still streamline the sharing quite a bit.

The other scenario is meeting with people you’ve not seen for awhile. Then you’ve got a bigger task, to share a sampler of your life since the last contact, but that’s not so difficult either. It may take a bit more time, but you can save it for replay.

The first step is to clean up your All Photos view of the Library by turning off Screenshots. If someone gets browsing through the Library, Screenshots rarely contribute to your story.

The next thing is to consider what you want to share and what search tools are already in place.

The new layout conveniently offers several new shortcut collections.

Recently Viewed

I love this collection. It shows what I’ve been looking at most recently, which is likely to include those photos that I love enough to share. But to be sure, all I have to do is skim through my All Photos view in the Library and open up the ones I’d like to have handy.

Boom! They’re automatically added at the top of the Recently Viewed Collection.

Recently Saved

This collection keeps track of the photos you’ve received as attachments and saved to Apple Photos. This is a popular scenario for grandkids and pets. And it’s a huge upgrade from using your Messages or Mail Apps as a photo gallery. The only thing worse than doomscrolling in Photos is to do it in your communications apps. But once you have those pictures added to your Photos Library you have multiple options to easily organize, view, and share them. And you can delete them from your Messages/Mail to save storage space.

And, yes, Saved Photos will also show up in the Recently Viewed Collection if you recently viewed them.

Recent Days

You might want to share some photos from a specific day you recall. The Recent Days Collection groups photos based on the digital date stamp. A quick find if you have a clear recollection of the date.

Now, the consideration with all of these is that at some point, as with the All Photos view, your friends might scroll past your intended shares into uncharted photos. Like letting Netflix launch the next movie on your TV. Not the end of the world, but there’s a better way.

If you want to share a nicely curated selection of pictures, you can still do it in seconds by creating an Album.

Albums

We’ve come to think of Albums as long term organizing tools, but they don’t need to be. It’s as easy as selecting the group of photos you want to share, tapping the ellipsis (three dots) icon to “add to Album.” Tap the “+” sign and you’ll be prompted to name a new Album with the selected photos. When you do that, the Album you made will show up at the beginning of the Albums Collection ready to open and share the photos (and videos) you selected.

You can even use the other Collections - Recently Viewed, Recently Saved, and Recent Days - as the gathering tools to make a curated Album. Why not? Or Maps, People & Pets, and so on.

One more thing.

You’ll see that Albums (like most collections) default to a Summary view that shows a condensed version of the Album. The icon at the bottom right lets you switch between Summary and All photos. But either way, you’ll be sharing the story you want to tell without danger of someone wandering outside the lines and getting lost in your library.

The big takeaway here is that Apple Photos is becoming more fluid in how it manages and displays our images. Organization is morphing from absolute - years, dates, locations - into relative - yesterday, last time, away from home - and adapting to the way we actually think about our lives. Apple Intelligence, once it is fully realized, promises to take us even farther. But we have more controls than ever to get us there.

And because of that, we don’t have to feel like Albums or Memories or Collections are cast in stone. An Album can serve a purpose and be deleted once that purpose is past. It can be easily recreated or replaced as needed.

So give some thought to your next meetup, with friends new and old. Give your Photos Library a proper pre-flight and find or create a Collection at hand that will surprise and delight everyone you share it with.

Want more detail? Check out this post > How to Use Pinned Collections