Your Photos App is a Search Engine, Not a Filing System

WHY YOUR PICTURES WILL ALWAYS BE IN THE LIBRARY

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

The whole point of using a photo database like Apple Photos is to organize and manage your pictures more efficiently than viewing them in a bunch of folders. Yet of all the frustrations I see posted in forums, photo organizing “limitations” in Photos tops the list, and it’s all about the relationship between the Library and user-created Albums. People are needlessly driving themselves nuts trying to jam square pegs into round holes because they think a photo database is just a super slick version of a filing cabinet.

It’s not.

Understanding how a database really works is the key to a happy digital photo experience.

What we learned.

If you are of a certain age, you grew up to Saturday morning room cleanup with Mom’s guidance.

“A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

Over time you applied the system to your CD collection, the local library, and office work. Filing, one way or another, is embedded in life 101. It’s required training to keep things accessible and safe.

The thing is that in the real world, physical objects really have to occupy a space. They have to go somewhere. And, to some degree or other, that space is finite. So you are managing both a thing and a space. You have to pick a space to hold the thing and you have to limit the number of things to the space available. Does your CD shelf have room for Barry Manilow AND Led Zeppelin? If not, who goes in the closet?

Answers will vary.

But then there’s the bigger question.

How do they get sorted?

Alphabetically? By music genre? By release date? Or some combination of them all.

Even a filing cabinet is littered with conundrums.

And who decides?

My wife filed the car titles under “Autos” and I went looking for them in “Mazda” and “Prius.” Or Toyota. I forget.

Like that.

Photo by Rhamely on Unsplash

In the real world, one thing exists in one place. And only one place. If I want to have Barry on my Oldies shelf AND under ‘M’ in the closet archive, I need to buy extra copies of his CD’s - I need two sets.

Or I just have to decide which spot is the better choice.

Or I live with A-P on the book shelf and Q-Z in the closet.

Except Queen should really be out of the closet.

Real Life is full of compromise.

Going digital changes everything. Because one thing can be in many places.

For some reason, I’ve never heard a complaint about the way the Music App manages songs even though it works just like Photos. The same song can live in the Music Library list, and in the Album, and in the Artist collection, and in the playlist we made for Pam’s birthday party.

Maybe because we’ve lived with iPods since 2001 and we’re just used to it. Maybe we’re less invested in organizing someone else’s songs than we are in our own pictures. Or maybe we just haven’t connected all the dots to grasp the Matrix-like world we enter through our iPhone’s 6 inch display.

I’ll go with that.

Digital isn’t inherently organized.

The key thing here is that the digital world has no inherent organization. It is just a bunch of data scattered around a hard drive platter or silicon chip. Whatever organization we assign to it is a fabric of our own design. So when we import the images from an SD card into a desktop folder or take a Selfie with our iPhone, the image data is actually scattered around the volume somewhere, swimming among all the music, documents, system caches, and other images already there. The folder we created is like a location in the Maps App. Just a visual reference to what we’re looking for.

In the real world we have to drive there.

In the digital world, the Mac or iPhone does the driving.

What that means is that while we are trained from birth to browse for things - I.e. go and look for them - the digital world is built on searches.

Some of those searches are built into the system and apps; some are defined by the user.

So that desktop folder where we saved the SD card images doesn’t really ‘hold’ those images at all. Choosing the folder merely tells the macOS to show us those particular images - wherever they are on the drive - when we open that folder. If we want to ‘move’ an image to a different folder we aren’t really moving it at all. We’ve just removed it from the access list in the first folder and added it to the second. To the Saturday morning clean your room mindset, that image has moved. But to the Matrix digital mindset, you’ve just reassigned the place to view it.

Which gets us to the Album paradox.

The foundation of all photo databases - Apple Photos, Google Photos, Capture One, Adobe Lightroom, Mylio Photos, Peakto, Luminar Neo, On1, the list goes on - is the pool of images assigned to it. If you consider your entire collection of images, that could be everything you’ve got or a subset of it. Whatever you chose to import or add to the photos app.

In Apple Photos that would be the Library. What we used to call the Camera Roll. It’s that ‘endless’ grid we know to scroll through when we want to see every image. Mylio has it. Lightroom has it. Every photo database has it.

What the Album paradox asks is if I create an Album and put your favorite picture of Granny in it, how come she still shows up in the Library view?

I see it all the time.

Users who are trying to apply a real world mindset to a digital universe. And it clearly drives them bonkers.

Digital organizing is really digital search.

What they don’t get is that the Library View is, itself, a digital assignment. A built in search request. We are just asking the Photos App to show us all the photos assigned to our Apple Photos database. Then Photos finds all the images on the hard drive that have been added to our .photoslibrary and displays them in the Photos Library window view.

The new Collections are the same thing. Recently Viewed, Illustrations, Trips, Recent Days, and so on are all pre-defined search windows for specific image data.

If we chose to view the Granny Album, Photos would select out the pictures assigned to Granny after it had found all the photos assigned to the whole database. But you would see the same Granny photo in either place because they are independent searches.

Let’s reverse the example.

In your Saturday morning real world, you would empty your sock drawer out on your bed to sort pairs. Now you have a bed full of socks and an empty sock drawer. You might match up pairs and toss some odd ones in the trash. Or be trendy and pair those up too.

But you still have an empty sock drawer.

If we apply our digital magic to your bedroom, you would have both a bed full of socks AND a full sock drawer.

But it gets even better.

You would also have a new drawer for just dress socks. And for odd socks, blue socks, striped socks, wool socks, and those cool VW branded socks from FatFace. You would even have a drawer for those cozy thick cotton socks that you wear all the time.

That’s the magic of digital organizing.

Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash

Rather than a 1 item to 1 place real world relationship, digital organizing offers a 1 item to many places relationship, allowing us to search and find specific pictures in almost infinite ways. Ways that fit perfectly into the world of machine learning, object recognition, and artificial intelligence.

And that’s on top of the Image metadata - Titles, Captions, Locations, Dates, and so on. Searching for our pictures is more and more like searching the internet and less like browsing through a filing cabinet.

You can start from anywhere.

The irony is that digital organizing also resolves issues number two and three on the Apple Photos complaint hierarchy; 1) endless scrolling in the library view and, 2) remembering which Album has Granny’s photo.

Once you adopt a search mindset you can find or at least narrow down your task to seconds. Just get on board with the notion that All your photos in your database will always show up in the Library view, regardless of what other places they appear. But that you can still create Albums and saved searches for convenience and your own sense of order.

You just aren’t moving anything anywhere.

And the thing is, we’re all in this for the long haul. Photo organizing mastery is becoming a life skill that benefits everyone with a smartphone as our photo collections continue to grow.

When our photo collections were only 3k pictures, we could make a simple set of folders work to keep things organized. With 30k, we can’t anymore. We need to step through that display into the digital universe and embrace the new tools it offers.

To find Granny.

If your photos are living on Apple devices - iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud - and you are confused, overwhelmed, or just eager to understand all the in’s and out’s of this amazing photography system, let me help you. You can see me at Bluewater Imaging. I provide easy to understand support and training to people worldwide.

Email paul@bluewaterimaging.com or book a free 15 minute phone consult HERE