Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Finding Pictures

The more pictures you have in your Photos library, the harder it gets to find the ones you want. Even with all the automatic albums Photos makes—Last Import, Favorites, Videos, and so on—and the albums you can create yourself (Chapter 3), it can still be difficult to locate certain stuff. You may get frustrated to the point that you’re tempted to swear off digital photography altogether—but don’t lose hope!

Photos has several features that can help. For example, you can add a favorite tag to certain images and Photos automatically rounds them up into a special album. And the program’s powerful search field lets you locate pictures and videos based on text or a date they include in their metadata (Photos for iOS). Another great way to find stuff is to add keywords to them that describe certain characteristics. And then there are Faces tags, which let you identify the people in your photographs (if you used iPhoto’s Faces feature, you’ll appreciate Photos’ simplified version). Many of these methods really shine when you combine them with smart albums (Smart Albums).

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use all of these features, and get strategic suggestions for assessing the images you import.

Note

Unlike iPhoto, which had a five-star rating system, Photos has what you might call a three-level rating system: hidden (Hiding Thumbnails), normal, and favorites (Viewing Favorites). Perhaps Apple found that people didn’t use all five stars, and that three levels ...