Photos Mastery the Family Way
PEOPLE & PETS IS THE GATEWAY TO A MEMORY RICH PHOTO COLLECTION
I know it’s Fall when I start getting inquiries about making photo books, calendars, and video slide shows. Something about coming back inside and being social begs the celebration of memories that may have happened only weeks before. It may be about a tribute for some occasion or a gift for the holidays. Other times it’s simply a marker for one more year.
But it’s almost always about people.
Apple Photos confounds people sometimes, especially since the latest round of upgrades with iOS/iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe. The once simple iPhoto App has evolved into a full-featured photo management system that offers almost every organizing and editing tool an enthusiast photographer might want. But in an effort to maintain the clean interface that Apple is known for, many features and settings aren’t obvious and the Photos experience can be confusing without some guidance.
People & Pets is the perfect place to start and Fall is the perfect time to use it.
As our photo collections grow, it’s a real time saver to use the built in tools that narrow down our search process for a particular photo. Swiping through your Library view is a tedious exercise for anything but the most recent photos.
The Collections built into Photos are really just Search presets for photos with specific characteristics; either the picture’s content or the data attached to it. Rather than entering that search criteria in the Search field, you can find Recently Saved, Trips, or Panoramas in a flash by just going to those Collections.
Which is the same idea for People & Pets, but the collection needs some guidance from you to get going. We need to open it up and identify all the faces that Photos has found in your Library.
When you tap on a face you can add the name. And if you see two faces of the same person, just drag one on top of the other to tell Photos that the pictures are of the same person. It will merge them. If you have faces that you don’t want included, you can remove them from the Collection.
It’s helpful to understand that the face identification is a “background task” in that Photos works on it mostly when you aren’t doing anything else in Photos. Because of the heavy load on the processor, Apple doesn’t want to slow down other tasks while it’s going on. That means Face IDs may happen a bit at a time over days or weeks. You may even get an alert that there are new faces to confirm when you open P&P. That is Photos learning to accurately identify people from odd angles, with sunglasses, and in a crowd, for instance. But it’s a fun exercise to see pictures pop up that you may not have seen for years. Just confirm or deny the ID until you are no longer prompted to check. Then the ID’s will happen automatically.
Since we’re in the Fall mode, though, we’re just getting started. Because once we have identified our family and friends, we can use Groups to create collections that are even more complex and specific to our project task.
The Groups feature in People & Pets allows us to search for pictures that include just certain people together. All your kids, for instance. Or their soccer team. You and your cat. The grandparents. You can also find pictures with you (or the subject) alone or with a group of random people. Basically every photo you show up in regardless of the situation.
Now you’ve laid the groundwork for so many of the searches that we tackle day to day.
Looking for Bitsy’s win in gymnastics last week? Go to People & Pets > Bitsy and you’ll find those shots right near the top of the grid. People & Pets sorts newest at the top by default. And - big plus - Face ID works with video as well as still photos.
Even for an older shot, skimming through a much smaller subset of your whole Photos Library is a big win. You can reduce your scroll to seconds.
Taken even further, once you’ve ID’d your important people you can use that in a Search. It could be Bitsy in Los Angeles. Or Bitsy 2022. There’s no reason to manually tag the photos with people if Photos does it for you. And once set up, it will continue to ID new photos as you import them. You can think of the whole task as collaborating with a virtual photo assistant who adds the data for you and keeps it up to date.
And for that Fall project, it gets the heavy lifting out of the way.
Doing a book or video for a retirement party, anniversary, birthday, or as a holiday gift? You can go to the person’s ID and have all their photos in one place to choose from. Maybe a family calendar? Make a Group of the whole family to narrow down your choices. Or the family pets.
Then it’s just a matter of selecting your favorites and adding them to a project Album where you can fine tune and edit your selections.
Going Beyond Face Detection in Apple Photos
If there is a single takeaway from the new release of Apple Photos, it’s that the way we find our pictures just changed. In a big way.
Spending time setting up your People & Pets Collection is a terrific way to become familiar with Apple Photos and how it works. You can do it when you have just a few minutes - one person at a time - or set up the whole collection at once. Remember to start with individuals, and then create favorite groups.
Even if you aren’t looking to create a project, how about getting a sense check for Fall get-togethers? Make a group of your old school chums or extended family. You can see when the last time was you were together.
Go check out your People & Pets Collection today.
If you would like an easy to follow complete setup guide for the PEOPLE & PETS COLLECTION in Apple Photos, you can get my PEOPLE & PETS SETUP GUIDE FOR IPHONE that builds this great feature for you. With one short lesson delivered to your InBox each day, you will have your P&P setup and running in just 5 days. Click on the button for more details and to purchase.
