The 5 Minute Photos Weekend Digest #3
OUT OF TOWN • NEW MACBOOK • CLASSIC PHOTOS • FILES
Today is a weather holiday for all of us in the Northeast, courtesy of this blizzard outside. So in that spirit, here’s my weekend digest. Delayed, as it is, by a trip out of town and a brutal winter cold. Both me and the weather.
OUT OF TOWN
Last weekend over President’s Day (remember when Lincoln & Washington were actually singled out of the pack?) we made a Valentine’s/Birthday/photo session trip to Vermont. As luck would have it I found a neat old hotel in downtown Brattleboro that looked intriguing and perfect for our 3-night stay. A restored, Art Deco building lovingly preserved. It turned out to be a delightful spot and I took detail shots to remind me of the unique experience. On top of period furniture, our room had a record player and a selection of LP’s in the lobby. The building also has a movie theater, so it’s a whole retro experience.
What I love is how all the photos I took are automatically gathered in a Trips Collection of their own.
The Latchis Hotel. I highly recommend it for a memorable place to stay in Southern Vermont.



MARCH APPLE EVENT
If you’ve been hankering for a new Mac replacement, keep an eye on March 4th for the anticipated launch of a new low-end MacBook. The rumor mill points to a smaller, lighter Mac than the MacBook Air and runs on the A-series chip that drives the iPhone. Yes, that’s less powerful than the M-series processors, but the A-chips have become pretty powerful in their own right and are extremely good at energy conservation; more battery life. No details yet on macOS restrictions or actual performance but it’s unlikely that Apple would build a new MacBook that didn’t offer a similar experience to the whole Mac lineup.
What’s really exciting is that a cheaper portable Mac could encourage people who are nursing along an old Mac, or those who have no Mac at all, to add it to their ecosystem.
Editing and organizing photos really benefits from having a bigger screen than your iPhone. Plus, the Mac version of Photos adds Smart Albums, Keywording, and Projects to the photo management experience. It’s just an easier, more efficient, and enjoyable way to work with your photos than pecking at a tiny screen.
CLASSIC PHOTOS
While staying at the Latchis Hotel in Vermont, we got to watch a movie each night at the Latchis Theater. For Valentine’s Day they screened the classic Casablanca, and on subsequent nights we saw H is for Hawk and Wuthering Heights. Seeing the 3 movies close together really made the older film stand out for its character and sharp storytelling. It reminded me how powerful it is to have the entire history of your photos in one collection, not broken up into “old photos” and new. Having those golden, distant memories pop up in Featured photos and Memory movies keeps them fresh and vital.
If you are running out of space to have all your photos in one place, please book a free consult or contact me to see if there’s a solution. Clients often come to me because their photo libraries have become so broken up they can’t enjoy the big picture of their life journey.
FILES
Along those lines, there are situations that deserve off-loading from your Photos Library. Remodeling pictures. Business related photos and records. Documents. Video clips of process or damage. These are files you may want to keep but simply clutter up your Photos Library with random content.
You can move these files to your Notes App and delete them from Apple Photos, but a simpler option is to make Folders on your iCloud Drive and put them there.
When you select a batch of pictures and use the Share action, you can Save to Files in the Share menu and create a folder on your iCloud Drive to keep them out of the way. That folder is accessible on your Mac and iCloud.com as well. Once copied there you can delete them from Apple Photos.
Just saying.
Thank you for being here!
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Just interested to know what your thoughts are on why it's better to have those business receipts, or project videos, etc., in FILES rather than on NOTES. I tend to put everything in Notes, and barely use FILES. But not sure why. Just a habit, I guess.