Trips With The New Apple Photos

Who, What, When, Why, WHERE? The unsung hero in photo management.

Photo by Emanuela Picone on Unsplash

Apple Photos has a new look with iOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia. Over the next few weeks I’m going to dig into the changes and offer insights about my favorite features and how you can make the Apple Photos ecosystem work better for you.

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When something happened has always been the biggie in photo organizing. We’re so used to timelines in our lives that it’s natural to look for photos based on when they were taken. Swiping through the camera roll is just a way of skimming through the timeline of our photos to get to such-and-such a date. Or so it seems.

Really, it’s about recognizing events . . . moments . . . that bookend the one we’re looking for. If we really were hunting for a date we would go right to the years and months view to zero in on the date we want and ‘boom’ there would be our picture.

The thing is that we remember photo moments in random ways. It might be a significant date, like an anniversary, or a milestone event like graduation. It may be defined by friends you saw, or what you did. Skydiving? And although most of us can pin down the month, at least over the past year, beyond that may be less clear.

I know the family went to Lake Placid in the spring, but which year?

The ‘new’ Apple Photos in iOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia has changed the game by offering up your photos in a whole new way, and I like it. The new concept is most obvious on the iPhone where you now get a single page with multiple search modules laid out at your fingertips. You can still see the most recent photos, but are also offered the other navigation choices in large, inviting widget-like buttons that deliver multiple ways to get to ‘that’ photo.

To be clear, there’s nothing about the new user experience that changes any organizing you’ve already done. Same pictures and Albums, just presented somewhat differently.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting about some of the Apple Photos changes in detail so stay tuned. For today, let’s go back to that vacation in Lake Placid and look at the new Apple Photos collection called Trips.