A new kind of photo album

The most familiar method of organizing images in Photos is the album. Each album can represent any designation you like, be it your pets, a vacation, your daughter, or your daughter’s ex-boyfriends. Follow these steps:

1. Create a new album.

   You can choose File  ⇒    New Album or press ⌘   +N. If you’ve selected any item thumbnails in the Viewer, they’re added to the new album automatically.

2. Type the name of your new photo album in the Untitled Album text box in the Sidebar (see Figure 13-2).
3. Press Return.

Photos also offers a special type of album called a Smart Album, which you can create from the File menu. (For even faster action, press ⌘   +Option+N.) If you’re familiar with the Smart Folders that you can use within the Finder and the Smart Playlists within Music (see Chapter 12), you’ve figured this one out already.

A Smart Album contains only photos that match certain criteria you choose, including the keywords you assign your images. Other criteria include text in the photo filenames, the dates when the images were added to Photos, a specific person you've identified, and any description you may have added (as well as camera-specific data, such as ISO and shutter speed).

Now here’s the really nifty angle: Photos automatically builds and maintains Smart Albums for you. It adds new photos that match the criteria and deletes those you remove from your Photo Library. (It also removes the photos that no longer match the Smart Album’s criteria.) Smart Album icons carry a gear symbol in the Photos Sidebar.

You can display (or edit) information about any photo or video clip by right-clicking the thumbnail and choosing Get Info from the shortcut menu. Click the Add a Title heading in the Info dialog to display a text box, where you type a new value. You can also type a short note or description in the Add a Caption box that appears in the dialog.

You can copy selected items from the Viewer into any album you choose. Right-click the desired items, hover your pointer over the Add To menu item, and choose the destination album. You can also copy selected items to an album by dragging them from the Viewer to the desired album entry in the Sidebar.

To remove a photo or video clip that has fallen out of favor, follow these steps:

1. Click the desired album in the Sidebar.
2. In the Viewer, click the item you want to remove to select it.
3. Press Delete.

When you remove a photo or clip from an album, you don’t remove the actual file from your collection (represented by Photos button on the toolbar or the Photos entry at the top of the Sidebar). An album is just a group of links to the images in your collection, just as a playlist in Music is a group of links to songs in your Music library. If you want to remove an offending photo from Photos, click the Photos button on the toolbar (or the Photos entry at the top of the Sidebar) to display your entire collection of photos and clips, and delete the item there. The item disappears from all albums with which it’s associated.

To remove an entire album, right-click the offending album entry in the Sidebar and choose Delete Album from the shortcut menu.

To rename an album in the Sidebar, click the entry below the Albums heading in the list to select it, and click again to display a text box. Type the new album name, and press Return.

Change your mind? Photos comes with a handy-dandy Undo feature. Just press ⌘   +Z, and it’s as though your last action never happened. (This trick is a great one for those moments when you realize that you just deleted your only image of your first car from your library.) For an extra level of backup protection for your priceless images, you can invest in an external drive and use the awesome Big Sur Time Machine backup feature. (Which you should be using anyway. Just saying.)

Working with People

Photos includes a powerful organizational tool called People, which appears as a separate item within the Sidebar.

People is a sophisticated recognition system that automatically recognizes human faces within the photos you add to your Photos library. (I don’t know whether it works well with pets, but you can try.) Naturally, you have to identify — or tag — faces before Photos can recognize them.

To tag a face, follow these steps:

1. In the Viewer, double-click the photo with a person you want to tag and click that person’s face.

   Note that Photos indicates each person’s face in the photo with a circle. If a face has already been tagged, the label (which appears when you hover your pointer over the icon) matches the person’s face.

2. To set Photos to always show labels in the Viewer — so that you don't have to click the Add Faces link — choose View  ⇒    Show Face Names.

3. Click the unnamed label below the person's face to open a text box, as shown in Figure 13-3.

4. Type the person’s name and press Return.

   If the name appears on a Contacts contact card — or is recognized as an existing People name or as one of your Facebook friends — you can click the matching entry that appears to confirm the identity. Wowzers!

5. To delete an incorrect face recognition, right-click inside the circle that appears around the face and choose This Is Not (Name) from the menu that appears.

Photos might not recognize the face if the person is turned at an angle to the camera or is in a darker area of the photo. If so, display the Info dialog and click the Add Faces link to display a “floating” circular outline. Then click the outline and drag the circle over the person’s face. If necessary, you can resize the box by dragging the handle on the right side of the circle. Finally, click the Click to Name label and type the person’s name.

After you tag an image, it appears in your People collection, which you can view by clicking the People entry in the Sidebar. You can double-click a portrait in your People collection to see all the images that contain that person.

Organizing with keywords

“Okay, Mark, albums and People are great ideas, but there has to be a way to search my library by category!” you say. Never fear, good Mac owner. You can also assign descriptive keywords to items to help organize your library and locate certain pictures and video clips fast. Photos comes with several standard keywords, and you can create your own as well.

To illustrate, suppose that you’d like to identify your images according to special events in your family. Birthday photos should have their own keyword, and anniversaries deserve another. By assigning keywords, you can search for Elsie’s birthdays or your silver wedding anniversary (no matter what collection or album they’re in), and all related photos with those keywords appear like magic!

Photos includes these keywords:

• Favorite
• Family
• Kids
• Vacation
• Birthday
• Flagged
• Photo Stream
• Check mark

What’s the check mark about, you ask? It’s a special case: The check-mark keyword comes in handy for temporarily identifying specific items, because you can search for only your check-marked photos and clips.

To assign keywords to images (or to remove keywords that have already been assigned), select one or more photos in the Viewer. Then choose Window  ⇒    Manage My Keywords or press ⌘   +K to display the Keyword Manager window, shown in Figure 13-4.

Drag the keyword buttons that you use most to the Quick Group section of the Keyword Manager window, and Photos automatically creates a keyboard shortcut for each keyword in the Quick Group. Now you don’t even need to display the Keywords window to get business done!

Click the buttons for the keywords you want to attach to the selected images to mark them, or click the highlighted buttons for the keywords you want to remove from the selected items.

Digging through your library with keywords

Behold the power of keywords! To sift through your entire collection of images by using keywords, click the Search button on the toolbar in the top-right section of the Photos window and type one or more keywords. To see all the items you’ve flagged as Favorites that include kids, for example, type Favorite Kids.

The images that remain in the Viewer after a search must have all the keywords you specified. If an image is identified by only three of four keywords you chose, for example, it isn’t a match and doesn’t appear in the Viewer. (You can create a Smart Album with specific keywords to get around this limitation.)

To search for a photo by words in its caption, just click the search box and start typing. You can search your images by date and rating as well.

Searching by locations where photos were taken

Photos can also track the location where photos were taken automatically, but this feature requires a digital camera that includes GPS tracking information in the image metadata for Photos to do so without your help. (Older camera models are unlikely to support GPS tracking. Naturally, most iPhones and iPads support this feature.) You don’t have to turn anything on to view photos by location.

When you’re viewing photos by Moments and Collections, you’ll notice that Photos includes the location name to identify where the photos were taken. To search for all images taken at a specific location, type the location name in the Search field.

If you right-click a specific photo (that includes location information) to select it and then choose Get Info from the shortcut menu, you see a close-up map of the location where the photo was taken.

Rotating tipped-over shots

If an image is in the wrong orientation and needs to be turned to display correctly, click the Rotate button to turn it once counterclockwise. Hold down the Option key while you click the Rotate button to rotate clockwise.

Crop ’til you drop (and a whole lot more)

Does that photo or video have an intruder hovering around the edges of the subject? You can remove some of the border by cropping an item, just as folks once did with film prints and a pair of scissors. (We’ve come a long way.) With Photos, you can remove unwanted portions from the edges of an image or video — a great way to get Uncle Milton’s stray head (complete with toupee) out of an otherwise-perfect holiday snapshot.

While you’re in Edit mode, follow these steps to crop, flip, and straighten an item:

1. Click the Crop button at the top of the window.

2. Select the portion of the image that you want to keep.

   In the Viewer, click and drag the right-angle handles at the corners of the rectangle to outline the part of the image you want. Whatever is outside this rectangle disappears when the crop is complete.

   When you drag a corner or edge of the outline, a semi-opaque grid (familiar to amateur and professional photographers as the nine rectangles from the Rule of Thirds) appears to help you visualize what you’re claiming. (Check it out in Figure 13-6.)

   You can expand the outline to the image’s full dimensions at any time by clicking the Reset Adjustments button in the bottom-right corner.

   See that attractive-looking Auto button that appears in the bottom-right corner of the Photos window when you’re in Crop mode? A single click of the Auto button and Photos takes its best shot at producing the ideal cropping and straightening job for you! If you don’t like the results, just use the Undo feature (⌘   +Z) to return the photo to its previous appearance.

   Photos features multiple Undo levels, so you can press ⌘   +Z several times to travel back through your past several changes. Alternatively, you can return the image to its original form (before you did any editing at all) by clicking the Reset Adjustments button.

3. (Optional) Choose a preset aspect ratio.

   You might want to force your cropped selection to a specific aspect ratio, such as 4x3 or 16x9 for a widescreen desktop background or 4x6 or 5x7 to match the dimensions of photo paper. If so, click the Aspect item on the right side of the window (available only while cropping) and choose that ratio from the pop-up menu that appears. (Pick the Square selection for the perfect Facebook profile image or the Freeform selection to allow any aspect ratio when your cropping is done.)

4. (Optional) Flip your photo or video horizontally.

   A click of the Flip item at the right side of the Crop window gives you the mirror image of your original photo.

   

5. (Optional) Straightening what’s crooked.

   Was your camera slightly tilted when you took the perfect shot? Never fear! Click the circular angle control on the right edge of the image and drag in the desired direction. (Besides straightening the subject, you can do some truly wild camera angles this way, just like in the ’60s Batman TV series!)

6. Click the Done button.

Enhancing images to add pizzazz

If a photo looks washed out, click the Auto Enhance button to increase (or decrease) the color saturation and improve the contrast. (The toolbar button sports a very fitting magic-wand icon.) Auto Enhance is automatic, so you don’t have to set anything — but be prepared to use Undo if you’re dissatisfied with the changes.

Removing rampant red-eye

Unfortunately, today’s digital cameras can still produce the same “zombies with red eyeballs” as traditional film cameras do. Red-eye is caused by a camera’s flash reflecting off the eyes’ interior surface, and it can occur with both humans and animals. (I’m told that pets get green-eye or blue-eye, but Photos can handle them, too!)

Photos can remove that red-eye and green-eye and turn frightening zombies back into your family and friends. In Edit mode, click the Adjust button at the top of the window; hover your pointer over the Red-Eye item on the right side of the screen; and click the Auto button that appears. Photos automatically attempts to remove any red-eye effect that it detects in the photo, and a blue check mark appears next to the Red-Eye item to indicate that a change was made.

Retouching like the pros

The Photos Retouch feature is perfect for removing minor flecks or lines in an image (especially those you’ve scanned from prints), and Retouch has been improved in macOS Big Sur. Click the disclosure triangle (which looks like a right arrow) by the Retouch item and click the Edit button that appears (which carries a paintbrush icon). Now hover your pointer over the photo to display the circular retouch tool. You can drag the Size slider to change the size of the retouch tool. Drag the pointer across the imperfection and click Done when you finish touching up. Don’t forget to take a moment to marvel at your editing skill!

Using filters and adjustments to add a mood

Wonder whether a particular photo or video in your library would look better in black and white (grayscale)? Click the Filters button at the top of the window to display a list of effects that you can apply to the item, including black-and-white effects, enhanced color levels, and subtle shading. Click any thumbnail in the strip to apply the filter.

If you’d like more precise manual control of your image attributes — including sharpness, color levels, shadows, definition, and white balance — click the Adjust button at the top of the window and explore the lengthy array of options. Note that most of the adjustments offer an Auto button if you hover your pointer over the entry, and you can click the disclosure triangle to the left of each entry to display additional controls that create a different look.