Why Digital Photo Organizing Confuses People

WE'RE NOT IN SHOEBOXES ANYMORE

I listened to a Q&A session the other day about using Apple Photos to organize pictures. There was a lot of curiosity about the new features and best practices. Good questions about do’s and don’ts. But one question I hadn’t expected popped up several times, in different ways, until I realized that many people misunderstand the basics of how digital photo organizing really works. And it’s the lynchpin that helps everything else make sense.

Ever since our mom insisted we clean up our room, things have had a place. Socks go in the sock drawer. Our puffy jacket hangs on the coat rack, not the couch. Legos . . . Well, Legos go everywhere but they’re SUPPOSED to go in the closet. We’ve been taught to think of our world in an orderly way even if half the population didn’t get it. Sorry, guys.

So it’s natural to approach digital photo organizing in the same way as physical organizing - that everything has A place. When we fill old shoeboxes with print envelopes and label each box with a year, we’re still sorting socks.

If you want to share a photo, you have to make a duplicate copy. Now there’s two of them, each one it’s own physical thing to occupy a different space even though the image is the same.

When photography became digital, we naturally transferred our physical habits along with it. We had things called Folders and Albums that looked like little folders and albums on the screen. Library sounds familiar. As does Catalog. It’s easy to feel like we’re in a familiar place, right? And that was Steve Jobs’ intention. It’s called skeuomorphic design and it was the foundation of Apple’s success as a user friendly digital platform.

The reality is much different, though, and digital organizing is like stepping into the Matrix where everything can be presented in almost infinite ways to suit our needs. It’s like placing those socks in your sock drawer and also finding them in your suitcase, the laundry basket, and - doggone - right there on your feet. Not copies, mind you, but the same actual pair of socks.

So digital organizing does the same thing, and it works particularly well for photo management.

Before we go there, it might help to look at the Music App which is a simpler version of the same idea.

Let’s say you load all the Beatles’ studio albums into Music. You’d have 12 albums with 213 songs. Music stores all this stuff in its music database, but it can show you that body of music in multiple ways.

By album.

By song.

And by any criteria contained in the songs - lyrics, date released, songwriter, and so on.

You can also make your own Playlist - the digital equivalent of mixtapes (for the Boomers in the crowd) either manually or by some search criteria.

The point is that you have one copy of every song but they can be grouped in multiple ways to suit your mood. You aren’t moving Sgt. Pepper from the Album view to the My Favorite Beatles’ Songs Playlist, you’re simply finding the song through various built in search filters.

Netflix browsing is another example. You might see your favorite series show up in the Home view or in My List or in the top 10 Most Viewed for the week. But it’s the same series and is streaming from the same place on Netflix’s servers.

Which brings us back to Apple Photos.

When we take a photo with our iPhone, import pictures from a flash card or hard drive, or save an image attached to Messages and email, we are adding that photo/video to the pool of media in Apple Photos. And unless we mistakenly add a photo twice, there is a single instance of that image wherever we find it when browsing through the Photos App. The Selfie of you in Disneyland with your best friend is the same image that you see in 2023, located in L.A. in Maps, in your and your friend’s People & Pets grids, from a search on “Disneyland,” and in the Album you created to build a “best of” road trips collection. Sooner or later the shot will probably show up in a Memory Movie too.

The very same image displayed in multiple places.

And there’s the rub.

In the real world your Selfie could only live in one Collection/place and you would have to know where to look for it. Doable, but tedious.

In the digital world, you toss your media into one large bucket (the camera roll/library) and ask to see it based on what aspect you recall at the time (place, person, date, situation, etc.) which can be confusing until you get the drift.

By the way, I f you’re wondering about the inciting question that inspired this post, it was: “If I move a photo into an Album, why does it still show up in the Library?”

And the inevitable follow up: “If I delete a photo from an Album, does it get deleted from the Library?”

These are shoebox questions. Film and print questions. Where everything has A place.

Here’s how it goes with digital.

Like your media in music and like Netflix, your photos all go into one bucket - a database. You see that as the Camera Roll or Library or Catalog, depending on your software’s jargon. Everything in one place. Your Mother Lode of pictures.

In Apple Photos, it’s called the Library. And the default settings show you every image in your Library sorted from the oldest to the newest. As we take and import more pictures, they get added here. You may have 5000 photos, or 30,000 photos, or 110,000 photos depending on your own photo activity. There’s no wrong number because there’s no shoebox. It is what it is.

But because it’s digital, we can have common sense pre-made collection filters to avoid scrolling through the whole Library to find a picture.

Just as the Music App has built in collections by Artist, Albums, and Songs, Apple Photos has collections by Year, Months, Recent Days, Videos, Screenshots, and Trips, among others. And you can make collections of your own with Albums; the same way you make a custom Playlist in Music. And like Playlists, Photos Albums are the only collection that are totally your own creation. Everything else is showing you photos in your Library through a pre-made search filter so you don’t have to scroll through your whole library to find THAT photo.

It’s really cool once you learn to think digital.

So, as you can see, adding photos to an Album you create doesn’t remove them (or make a duplicate) from the Library. They’re the same pictures, just accessed through a different collection filter. Then, if you delete the photo from the Library, with the expectation that it will remain in the Album, you’ll be disappointed by the fact that it’s gone everywhere.

But here’s the thing. In an effort to help users avoid unintentional loss, Apple offers you guidance every time you delete a photo from anywhere in Apple Photos. You’ll get one of two messages:

1. This photo will be deleted from iCloud Photos on all your devices. It will be in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

2. Do you want to delete this photo or remove it from this album?

And unlike the shredder you used on your paper prints, Photos will keep your deleted images in a Recently Deleted Album for 30 days.

So, how would you answer the questions?

Q: If I move a photo to an Album, why does it still show up in the Library?

And,

Q: If I delete a photo from an Album, will it delete from the Library too?

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