Mac Tips: Photos - find anything, fast.
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Most of us have thousands of photos and no idea where anything is. The good news: the Photos app on your Mac quietly does an enormous amount of work behind the scenes - recognising faces, places, objects and even words inside your pictures - so you can find that one shot in seconds instead of scrolling for ten minutes.
1. Search by what's in the picture, not the date.
You don't need to remember when you took a photo - you can search for what's actually in it. Photos analyses every image and lets you find shots by object, scene, place, or even text it spots in the picture. Type 'dog on beach' and you'll get exactly that. It's the single biggest time-saver in the whole app.
→ Click the search box (top-right) and type a thing: 'coffee', 'passport', 'whiteboard', 'birthday cake'. Photos finds them.
→ Search for a place - 'Bath', 'Cornwall', 'France' - and see everything shot there, even if you never tagged it.
→ Combine terms: 'Sarah beach 2023' narrows it right down.
→ Look for text: search 'invoice' or a road sign and Photos reads words inside your pictures (Live Text).
2. Let Memories and People do the sorting for you.
Photos automatically groups your library into People, Pets, Places and 'Memories' - little auto-made slideshows set to music. Spend two minutes naming a few faces and the app gets dramatically better at surfacing the people who matter and hiding the ones who don't.
→ Open the People & Pets album in the sidebar, then click a face and give it a name - tag it once and every future photo of them is grouped automatically.
→ Add someone to Favourites so they always appear near the top, and use 'This Person is Not...' to fix any mix-ups.
→ Browse the Memories tab for ready-made slideshows - great for a quick share, or set one as your screen saver.
→ Not keen on a Memory? Hover over it and choose to see fewer like it, or feature it more often.
3. Get more out of Live Photos and editing.
The tools built into Photos are more capable than most people realise - no third-party app needed. You can turn a Live Photo into a looping video, tidy up a whole batch of shots in seconds, and edit RAW files without losing any quality. Every edit is non-destructive, so you can always go back to the original.
→ Open a Live Photo and click the 'Live' dropdown (top-left) to try Loop, Bounce or Long Exposure - Long Exposure turns waterfalls and traffic into silky motion.
→ Change the 'key photo' of a Live Photo so the still frame you share is the best moment, not the first one.
→ Copy your edits from one photo and paste them onto a batch - select several, then Image → Paste Adjustments.
→ Shoot in RAW? Photos edits it directly, and 'Revert to Original' undoes everything if you change your mind.
4. Share the right photos - and hide the rest.
Sharing a whole album with family, or keeping a few pictures private, is quick once you know where the controls are. iCloud Shared Albums let everyone add their own shots to the same collection, and the Hidden album keeps sensitive pictures out of your main view - locked behind Touch ID or your password.
→ Create a Shared Album (File → New Shared Album), invite family, and let everyone contribute - it doesn't count against your iCloud storage.
→ Right-click any photo and choose Hide; the Hidden album stays locked until you unlock it, so nothing awkward appears when you're showing someone your holiday snaps.
→ Use the Recently Deleted album to recover anything you binned by mistake - it's kept for 30 days.
→ Turn on iCloud Photos (Settings → iCloud) so the same library appears on your Mac, iPhone and iPad, always in sync.
• Search is the fastest route to any photo - describe what's in it rather than scrolling by date.
• Naming a handful of faces once makes People, Memories and search far more accurate from then on.
• Every edit is non-destructive: 'Revert to Original' is always there, so experiment freely.
• Hidden and Recently Deleted are both locked and recoverable - private stays private, and mistakes are reversible for 30 days.
• Whether you bought your Mac from us or got it through your employer's scheme, your whole photo library syncs neatly across every Apple device you own.
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Farpoint Developments Ltd. · farpoint.co.uk · 01225 460 678