1. What Is Photos for Mac?

This chapter covers all the requirements you need to run Photos for Mac and use it to its fullest. It also covers the Photos interface, so you can easily return to this chapter when you need a refresher on where things are in Photos.

Getting to know Photos

Getting the current version of Photos

Understanding the Photos interface

Photos for Mac is different things to different people—it’s a versatile app. However, versatility does not necessarily mean complicated. After you learn Photos, you’ll see just how simple Apple has made it to use. This chapter first describes the three primary things Photos enables you to do: organize, edit, and share your photos. After that, you find out how to keep Photos up to date and take a quick walkthrough of its main interface.

Navigating and Organizing Your Photos

In the days before the digital camera, you could spend a lot time and money taking and developing photographs. But thanks to camera manufacturers going digital, we can now take a virtually limitless (and free) number of photos. Digital camera manufacturers might have freed us from the hassles associated with old, physical development techniques, but the one thing they didn’t do is give us a good way to sort through and organize our digitized pics. Thankfully, Apple has designed Photos for Mac for just that purpose.

Apple realizes that although digital cameras are fun and powerful tools (indeed, it includes one on every iPhone), camera manufacturers aren’t as good at designing software as they are at creating phenomenal photography equipment, so Apple designed Photos to work with any camera on the market. The app lets you easily plug your camera into your Mac and upload your photos in a snap. What’s more, Photos automatically groups your photos by Moments, Collections, and Years, so you can easily browse by date and location. (No more piling all your photos into one big folder or library!) Furthermore, Photos can automatically separate your photos into a specific album called Faces, which lets you navigate through your pics by the people in them. I’ll talk all about Moments, Collections, Years, and Faces later in the book.

Apple also understands that you want control over your photo organization and navigation. That’s why you can easily create albums, folders of albums, and even smart albums, which are albums that have rules applied, such as “Show me all the photos I’ve edited.” When it’s time to find something in your well-organized system, Apple lets you easily search through your photo libraries using Photos’ powerful Search and Tagging features.

Editing Your Photos

Photos is more than just an organization tool. It’s also a powerful photo editor. Using the built-in editing tools, Photos can rotate and crop your photos, eliminate red-eye and blemishes with the click of a button, and even straighten crooked pictures.

Photos also lets you apply several effects to your photographs, such as lightening or darkening a photo, making it warmer or cooler, and adding sepia tones and other filters to it. In addition, Photos gives you access to complete histogram tools so you can tweak your photos like a pro.

The best (and least known) feature of Photos’ editing capabilities, however, is that it uses a nondestructive editor, which means that when you edit a photo—no matter how many times you adjust a photo’s color, crop it, or apply effects—you can always return to the original photo with a click of a button. Photos accomplishes this by creating and saving an original copy of your imported photograph every time you begin to edit it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve edited a photo 100 times over a period of years. Simply click Revert to Original and the photograph will look as it did the day you took it.

Sharing Your Photos

You probably don’t take photographs solely for your own enjoyment. You want to share them with your friends and family. Photos enables you to share photos through many old-school ways, such as printing a photograph on your printer or emailing a photo to a friend. But you can also share your photos across the web via Photos’ tight social networking integration with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other services. Photos also enables you to easily design slideshows, calendars, books, and cards right in the app. You can then purchase these items within Photos and give them to your friends and family as keepsakes.

If you don’t have OS X Yosemite version 10.10.3 or higher, you can run Software Update on your Mac to upgrade to the latest version of Yosemite (if you’re already running an earlier version of Yosemite), or you can download the latest version of Yosemite for free through the Mac App Store. Simply launch the Mac App Store from the Applications folder on your Mac, search for “Yosemite,” and then click the Get button.

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)

• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, Early 2009, or newer)

• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)

• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)

• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)

• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)

It’s also a good idea to have plenty of free hard-drive space and extra RAM so the Photos app runs fluidly and you have lots of room to store your photos. You need a minimum of 5GB of free hard-drive space and 2GB of RAM, but more is better.

• An Internet connection

• A digital camera (including an iPhone)

• An e-mail account

• An iCloud account

• A Facebook account

• A Flickr account

• A Twitter account

1. Click the Apple menu in the upper-right corner of your screen.

2. Click App Store to open the Mac App Store app.

3. Click the Updates tab in the Mac App Store to check for any updates to OS X or any apps on your computer. If it finds any updates, it will list them.

4. Click the Update All button to install the new updates. Any time there is an OS X update, you’ll have the latest version of Photos for Mac after the update is installed.

Click the Photos icon once in the Dock or via Launchpad to open it; double-click the icon if you are launching Photos from within the Applications folder.

Photos’ simplified layout

The alternative interface is the “expanded” interface. This expanded interface removes the four tabs from the top of the Photos windows and adds a sidebar running along the left side of the app. In the sidebar are sections for Photos, Shared, Albums, and Projects, but every individual album, shared library, and project are also listed there. The expanded layout makes it much easier to drag and drop photos from one album to the next and get a complete overview of all the albums, shared libraries, and projects that make up your Photos library.

Photos’ expanded layout

1. From the simplified interface, click View in the menu bar and then click Show Sidebar.

2. Alternatively, from the expanded interface, click View in the menu bar and then click Hide Sidebar.

As you can imagine, the main viewing area changes depending on what function Photos is performing. When you are editing, the main viewing area shows the edit screen. When you are creating a calendar, the main viewing area shows the projects screen. These screens are covered in detail throughout the book.

• Stoplights: Click red to close the Photos window; click yellow to minimize the window into the Dock; and click green to make the Photos app full screen. (These buttons are default system-wide OS X buttons that every app has.)

• Back/Forward: Click these buttons to go back to the previous screen or—if you have already clicked the Back button at least one time—to go forward one screen.

• Icon Zoom slider: Adjust this slider to increase or decrease the size of the photo icons in the main viewing area.

• Source buttons: These buttons are arranged in the toolbar only in simplified view. Options include Photos, Shared, Albums, Projects, and Import (although Import is only available when a device that contains photos, such as a camera or SD card reader, is connected). When you click any of these buttons, the main viewing area displays the photos associated with the selected category.

• + button: Click this button to create new albums and projects.

• Share button: Click this button to share currently selected photos with others by uploading them to your iCloud, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook accounts, or by sending them to friends via email, Airdrop, or Messages. It also allows you to set an image as a desktop picture.

• Search: Click the Search button to find photos by title, keyword, description, date, or location.

Photos library: This icon comprises all of the photos in your Photos library organized into Moments, Collections, and Years, so you can easily browse them by date and location.

Import: This header only shows up when you have devices that contain photos plugged into your Mac. It will list any currently connected cameras, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Read more about importing in Chapter 2, “Importing Your Photos.”

Shared: If you are using any of the iCloud sharing features of Photos, those shared libraries show up here. Read more about iCloud sharing in Chapter 13, “Sharing Your Photos.”

Albums: This header displays all the albums, smart albums, and folders you have created. Albums are covered in Chapter 5, “Working with Albums.”

Projects: Any projects such as cards, slideshows, books, or calendars that you have created or are working on will show up here. Read more about projects in Chapter 11, “Creating Keepsakes.”