The process for emailing pictures and videos using your iOS device is nearly the same as on a Mac. The hardest part to remember is to start the email from the Photos app, instead of the Mail app (the latter doesn’t let you attach images).

To email pictures from your iOS device, use the techniques on Hiding Thumbnails to select some thumbnails in Photos, and then tap the share icon at the lower left. On the screen that appears, tap the Mail icon. After a moment, a new email message pops open. Just tap the To field and enter an address, tap Subject and enter something clever to get your recipient’s attention, and then tap the body of the message—above the attached image thumbnails—and enter your message.

When you’re finished, tap Send, and then pick an image-size option from the resulting screen. (You get the same size options as you do when emailing images in Photos for Mac [Sharing via Email].) Once you tap a size, Photos for iOS prepares the images for their journey and sends your email. You don’t get a confirmation message with this method, so you just have to trust that the email actually went where you told it to.

As you probably know, Twitter is the free microblogging site that lets you announce to the world—in brief, 140-character messages—exactly what you’re doing or thinking. You can liven up your posts by using Photos to include a picture. For example, instead of declaring that you enjoyed a delicious bowl of oatmeal this morning, you can show the world exactly what it looked like. Ain’t technology grand?

Start the Twitter party by visiting www.twitter.com and creating an account. Next, in Photos for Mac, select a picture to share, click the share icon in Photos’ toolbar (it’s circled back in Figure 8-1), and then choose Twitter; the sheet shown in Figure 8-4 appears. (If this is the first time you’ve used Twitter on your Mac, Photos prompts you to set up your account. Click Add Account and you’re transported to the Internet Accounts pane of your Mac’s System Preferences. Enter your account user name and password, click Next, and then click Sign In. If everything goes well, switch back to Photos and choose Twitter from the share icon again.) Enter something clever and, if you like, click Add Location at lower left to add your computer’s current location to the message. Click Send and Photos cheerfully lets you know your picture was successfully published.

Figure 8-4. The gray number circled here lets you know how many characters you have left in your Twitter message. The image link consumes 21 characters, so you really only have 119 for your prose.

On an iOS device, the process is almost exactly the same except that you click the share icon (the square with an up arrow) to get started.

Love it or loathe it, Facebook is an integral part of over a billion people’s daily lives. It’s the easiest way to share pictures and videos among a large group of people because it’s user-friendly and it doesn’t matter what flavor of computer or smartphone you use to interact with it. To get a free account, mosey on over to www.facebook.com where you can create a profile page and, if you wish, add résumé-like details, lists of your favorite books, movies, quotes, and so on. You can then link your profile to the profiles of other people by sending them a friend request. Once the request is accepted, you can see each other’s profile pages and socialize with them in the virtual realm. You also get notifications of what they’re up to.

Once you get your Facebook page going, you can use Photos to upload individual pictures and videos to your Facebook Timeline, add them to an existing Facebook album, or create a new one. You get full control over who sees your goodies. And by tagging friends in your pictures, those pictures appear on your friends’ Facebook Timelines, too.

Posting pictures and videos to Facebook is unbelievably easy. Begin by selecting thumbnails (Selecting and Hiding Files) of the content you want to share. Next, in Photos for Mac, click the share icon in Photos’ toolbar and choose Facebook. (If this is the first time you’ve done this, or if you haven’t yet added your Facebook account to your Mac, Photos prompts you to log into your Facebook account; click Add Account, and Photos opens the Internet Accounts pane of your Mac’s System Preferences. Enter your user name and password, click Next, and then click Sign In. Switch back to Photos, click the share icon again, and choose Facebook.) A message pane appears in the middle of the Photos window (see Figure 8-5), where you can set options for the post and enter a description. Click Post, and Photos uploads it to Facebook.

Figure 8-5. The menus labeled here let you specify who can see your post and where it appears. The menu at the upper left lets you choose Public, Your friends, or any group of friends you’ve created in Facebook. The menu at the upper right lets you control where Facebook will display your post: on your Timeline or in an existing Facebook album. You can also add your current location to the picture(s) by clicking Add Location at this pane’s lower left.

Posting to Facebook using Photos for iOS is quite similar, though you need to log into your Facebook account using the Facebook app (it’s free from the App Store). Facebook also needs to be added to your iOS device’s list of sharing destinations, as Figure 8-6 explains. Once you’ve done that, select the picture(s) you want to post, and then tap the share icon and choose Facebook.

After your post is complete, you can sit back and watch the comments and likes happen in real time. It’s actually quite fun and satisfying, especially when sharing stuff with far-flung friends and family members who you don’t get to see often (or at all).

Rounding out the list of Photos’ social-media sharing destinations is Flickr, an extremely popular site dedicated to photography. You can get a free account by signing up at their website, www.Flickr.com, though you can also log in with your Facebook or Google account (if you have one).

Figure 8-6. Left: After selecting some thumbnails (page 59) and clicking the share icon, scroll horizontally through the row of share destinations shown here, and then tap More. Right: On the screen that appears (shown here), tap the switch next to Facebook to turn it on (it turns green). If you tap Done at the screen’s upper right, a Facebook icon appears in the row of sharing destinations. Give it a tap and use the resulting form to set the post’s privacy and location, enter a description, and so on.

Amazingly, Flickr lets you upload up to a terabyte of photos and videos at full resolution (Resolution Matters). For example, if you shoot with a 6.5-megapixel camera, that’s 537,731 photos (sounds like a backup solution, doesn’t it?). Pictures are limited to 200 megabytes each; videos can’t weigh more than 1 gigabyte, and their pixel width can’t exceed 1080 pixels in high definition.

When you join Flickr, you’re in for quite a ride—it’s not just a place to post your pictures on the Web for your friends and family to see, although it’s great for that. It’s also a place where photography fans give feedback, link to one another’s Flickr pages, and so on. Many Flickr fans add tags to their images so folks can easily find them—say, “NASA,” “macro,” “portrait,” or location-based tags such as “Maui” or “Rome.” You can also order hardcover, printed books of your Flickr posts, complete with matching dust jackets.

Posting pictures to Flickr works just like it does for Twitter and Facebook. First, visit www.Flickr.com and create an account. Second, in Photos for Mac, select some thumbnails, click the share icon, and then choose Flickr. If this is the first time you’re interacting with Flickr on your Mac, Photos prompts you to add the account. Click Add Account and the Internet Accounts pane of your Mac’s System Preferences appears. Enter your user name and password, click Next, and then click Sign In. Next, switch back to Photos, choose Flickr from the share menu again, and you see the pane shown in Figure 8-7.

Figure 8-7. Here you can add a title, description, and tags to the stuff you upload to Flickr. Use the menu at the upper right to set privacy options, and the one at the lower right to specify which Flickr set (think “album”) you want to tuck the images into.

When you’re finished filling out the message form, click Publish. Depending on the size and number of items you’re uploading, this process can take awhile.

The process for posting content to Flickr using Photos for iOS is nearly the same. Use the techniques described on Hiding Thumbnails to select some content, and then tap the share icon. Scroll through the horizontal row of sharing destinations until you see Flickr, and then tap its icon. Fill out the resulting message and tap Publish. That’s all there is to it!

In order to use iCloud Photo Sharing, you first have to turn it on. Here’s how:

Figure 8-8. The iCloud pane of Photos’ preferences holds the key to turning on various iCloud services. If you someday decide to turn off iCloud Photo Sharing on one of your devices, the contents of any shared albums will still be visible and editable on any other devices that still have iCloud Photo Sharing turned on.

Creating a shared album in Photos for Mac is mercifully simple. Photos for iOS lets you create albums, too, so you can quickly share content with others no matter where you are (talk about instant gratification!).

In Photos for Mac, simply select an album or use the techniques described on Selecting and Hiding Files to select a few thumbnails. Next, click the share icon in Photos’ toolbar and choose iCloud Photo Sharing, or Control-click a selected thumbnail and choose Share→iCloud Photo Sharing. You can also choose File→Share→iCloud Photo Sharing to get started.

In the “Add to Shared Album” sheet that appears (Figure 8-9, left), click New Shared Album, and the sheet shown in Figure 8-9 (right) appears, which lets you name the album and invite someone to subscribe to it by entering his name, email address, or cell phone number into the To field. In the Comment field, enter a description of the pictures you’re sharing.

Figure 8-9. Left: Choosing iCloud Photo Sharing from this menu summons the sheet shown here. If you’re adding pictures to a previously shared album, enter a comment in the field at the top of this sheet, and then click a shared album in the list. Right: When you create new shared album, this sheet lets you name the album, invite people to it, and so on.

When you’re finished filling out the all the fields, click Create. The lucky people you include in the To field promptly receive an email invitation to subscribe to your freshly shared album. Once they click the Subscribe button in the email, the shared album appears in Photos’ Shared view on all their devices. The Photos icon in the Dock on the recipient’s Mac shows a tiny red circle containing the number of invitations that await them. (When invitations are awaiting your attention, you see the same red circle on the Photos icon in your Mac’s Dock and on your iOS devices.)

To create a shared album in Photos for iOS, use the techniques described on Hiding Thumbnails to select some thumbnails—unfortunately, there’s no way to select a whole album—and then tap the share icon. On the resulting screen, tap the colorful iCloud Photo Sharing icon. In a moment, you see a message screen with a stack of tiny thumbnails representing the images you’re about to share (see Figure 8-10, left). If you like, you can tap the Comment field to enter some descriptive text (don’t worry; you’ll get another chance to enter a comment before the album is shared). Next, tap Shared Album at the bottom of the message; you see a list of the albums you’ve shared and the ones you subscribe to (see Figure 8-10, right). Tap New Shared Album at the top of the list, and enter a name for the album on the next screen. Tap Next, and then tap the To field on the next screen to enter an email address. Tap the + icon at the right of the field to tunnel into your Contacts app and search for the lucky recipient, or scroll to find her name in the list. Keep tapping the + icon to return to your Contacts list until you’re finished adding email addresses. Once you’re done, tap Next and you see the first message screen, where you can enter a comment if you didn’t do so before. Finally, tap Post to send your album invitations!

Figure 8-10. Left: On an iOS device, use the sheet shown here to enter a comment about your new album (if you wish). When you’re done, tap Shared Album. Right: This sheet contains all your shared albums. Tap New Shared Album, and then fill out the resulting message fields as described in this section.

Once you share or subscribe to a shared album (or several), Photos collects updates to shared albums in the Activities album (Shared View) in Shared view, which you can see in both Photos for Mac and Photos for iOS. When you open this album, you see big, beautiful thumbnails of the most recent additions to each album, grouped according to album name. Just scroll through the list to see all recent activity, including comments (Downloading Shared Content). Beneath the thumbnails of albums that you’ve shared, you’ll spot a clickable link that takes you into the contents of that particular album (“See all 89 photos,” say). This is a great way to breeze through all the goodies in your shared albums and see what everyone is up to.

Once you’ve created a shared album, you can add more goodies to it in Photos for Mac in the following ways:

To add content to a shared album in Photos for iOS, use the techniques described on Hiding Thumbnails to select some photos and/or videos, and then tap the share icon. Next, tap the iCloud Photo Sharing icon; a message screen appears and you can add a comment. Tap Shared Albums at the bottom of the screen, and in the resulting list of albums, tap the album you want to tuck the content into. A blue checkmark appears to the right of its name. Tap Post, and Photos adds your goodies to the album you picked. Alternatively, you can open the shared album first, and then tap the + button that appears at the end of the album. When you do, you’re whisked into Photos view, where you can tap to select thumbnails of the stuff you want to include. When you’re finished, tap Done. You can also add stuff while viewing the Activities album on your iOS device, as described in the last bullet point above.

If, for whatever reason, you no longer wish to share the contents of your Kickboxing album (say, you don’t want to give Grandma a heart attack), or if you don’t want to subscribe to an album someone else shared with you, you can delete the album. If you’re the owner of the album, deleting it doesn’t remove its contents from your Photos library. But if you merely subscribe to the album, the content disappears when you delete it (that is, unless you downloaded its content as described on Downloading Shared Content).

Deleting a shared album is simple, and you can do it in a few different ways in Photos for Mac:

Dust off your hands and imagine a tiny poof sound as the shared album instantly disappears from all your subscribers’ devices. Of course, any content your subscribers downloaded from the shared album (Downloading Shared Content) still exists on their devices.

In Photos for iOS, tap Shared at the bottom of your screen and, if necessary, use the Back button at upper left to close the shared album you’re viewing so you see thumbnails of all your shared albums. Tap Edit at upper right, and then tap the red circle with a dash that appears to the album’s left. Tap the big red Unsubscribe button that appears at right, and then tap Unsubscribe in the confirmation message that appears. The album disappears from Shared view in Photos for iOS and in Photos for Mac.

A bonus (and semi-hidden) feature of shared albums is that you can let any subscriber add his own pictures and videos to the album. Doing so creates incredibly convenient, two-way sharing between you and your subscribers.

To set it up in Photos for Mac, double-click a shared album to open it or, if you have the sidebar turned on (The Two Faces of Photos), just click the album’s name in the Sharing section to select it. Next, click the subscriber icon in Photos’ toolbar (it’s circled in Figure 8-11). In the sharing sheet that appears, turn on Subscribers Can Post.

Figure 8-11. Click the subscriber icon (circled) to reveal a sheet that lets you perform all manner of subscriber-related chores. An X next to a name means that person unsubscribed from the album (the nerve!), though a question mark to the left of a name means that person hasn’t responded. In that case, you can resend an invitation (as shown here), remove subscribers, grant them permission to post material, turn the album into a public website, disable subscriber notifications, and delete a shared album.

In Photos for iOS, tap Shared at the bottom of your screen and, if necessary, tap the Back button at the upper left to close the shared album you’re viewing so you see the thumbnails of all your shared albums. Next, tap the thumbnail of the album that you want to grant uploading permission to; you see the album’s thumbnails, as shown in Figure 8-12, left. Next, tap People at the bottom right and the screen shown in Figure 8-12, right, appears. Tap the Subscribers Can Post switch to turn it on (it turns green). Now your subscribers can add their own stuff to the album.

Figure 8-12. Left: When you open a shared album in Photos for iOS, use the buttons at the bottom to switch between viewing thumbnails (Photos) and the people you invited to the album (People). Right: This screen lets you grant subscribers permission to post their own stuff using the switch circled here. You can also see who you invited to the album and their invitation status, invite more people, generate a public website (page 220), manage the album’s notifications (page 219), and delete the album (scroll down further to see the Delete button).

From this point on, the shared album synchronizes everyone with access to it: Any items you, or a subscriber, add to the shared album is sent to every device of every person who subscribes to it. Likewise, any items you, or a subscriber, remove from the shared album disappear on all subscribed devices. It’s a heck of a lot of fun and the perfect way to share pictures with folks who aren’t on Facebook or who aren’t particularly tech-savvy.

So you forgot to add Aunt Edna to a shared album and now she’s upset. No big deal—you can easily invite her after creating the album. On the flip side, perhaps you want to remove an existing subscriber from a shared album (handy for breakups and other squabbles). These kinds of subscriber-management chores are easy to handle in both Photos for Mac and Photos for iOS.

First, select the shared album by either clicking it in the sidebar’s Shared section or by clicking the album’s thumbnail in Shared view. Next, click the subscriber icon in Photo’s toolbar (it’s circled in Figure 8-11). In the sheet that appears, you can do all kinds of practical stuff such as edit the album’s name, invite new subscribers, remove existing ones, resend invitations, and so on:

In Photos for iOS, you can do all of the above using the People screen shown back in Figure 8-12 (right). To get there, tap a shared album to open it, and then tap the People button at the bottom of your screen. There you can:

The ability to manage your shared albums in this way on your iOS device is pretty amazing. Simply put, you don’t have to be home and in front of your Mac to do this stuff. You can easily manage shared albums while globetrotting, waiting at the car wash, or getting a tattoo. Just remember to put down your iOS device every once in awhile so you can interact with other humans in person!

If the people you want to share your digital mementos with don’t have an iCloud account, don’t worry; Photos for Mac and iOS is more than happy to whip up a quick public web page that anyone can view in a web browser. Figure 8-13 shows an example of a public site.

Figure 8-13. Here’s what a public website looks like. The result is nice enough, sure, but it’s a no-frills web page that you can’t customize in any way (beyond which pictures and videos it contains).

To create a website from a shared album in Photos for Mac, open the album or select it in the sidebar’s Shared section. Click the Subscriber icon in Photos’ toolbar (circled in Figure 8-11) and turn on Public Website. A custom web address for the album appears (it begins with https://www.icloud.com). Click it and Safari (or your preferred web browser) springs into action and displays the page. If you use Safari, you can easily share the address with others by choosing File→Share→Email This Page in Safari (or choose one of the other sharing options in the same menu). You can copy the address by highlighting it and choosing Edit→Copy, and then you can paste the address into, say, a group email message.

To do this in Photos for iOS, tap to open the shared album, and then tap the People button at the bottom of your screen. In the sheet that appears (visible back in Figure 8-12, right), tap to turn on the Public Website switch (it turns green). Next, tap the Share Link that appears and use the icons on the resulting screen to choose how you want to share the link. You can send it via AirDrop (Sharing via AirDrop), Messages (Sharing via Text Message), Mail (Sharing via Email), Twitter (Sharing Online), or Facebook (Facebook)—swipe left to scroll horizontally to see more icons or tap More icon to view additional apps. You can also tap the Copy button to copy the link to your device’s clipboard so you can paste it in another app on that device (such as Safari, so you can see what the site looks like).

Either way, visitors to your public web gallery can click a photo to enlarge it, and then click the left and right arrows that appear to move through the content (the arrow keys on your keyboard work, too). Even more options appear at the top of the enlarged picture’s page, as Figure 8-14 explains.

Figure 8-14. After enlarging a picture on a public website, point your cursor near the top of the page and you see the row of buttons shown here. From left to right, they let you return to the gallery page to see all the pictures it contains, trigger a slideshow, download an image, or enter Full Screen view (great for viewing slideshows!).

People who view your public website can easily download stuff you shared. All they have to do is click to enlarge an image, point their cursor near the top of the page, and then click Download. When they do, the full-resolution picture or video is deposited in their computer’s Downloads folder. This is great news for far-flung friends or relatives who want to print an image, but maybe bad news for you in terms of would-be picture thieves who can easily grab your content and use it as their own. That said, the probability of such a thing happening is somewhat slim, because the site is a bit hard for the masses to find.

Another downside (besides your full-resolution images being available to anyone who happens upon the site) is that your subscribers can’t comment or like any of the pictures the site contains. However, if any comments were made before you created the public website, then those comments remain visible.

Fortunately, public websites are as easy to take down as they are to create. All you have to do is open the shared album, click the subscriber icon circled in Figure 8-11, and then turn off Public Website. Deleting the shared album using the techniques described on Deleting and Unsubscribing from a Shared Album works, too. In Photos for iOS, open the People sheet as described earlier (Managing Subscribers), and then simply turn off the Public Website switch (it goes from green to gray).

Once you give others permission to add their own content to a shared album, you may want to include some of their images in a book, card, or calendar project (see Chapter 9). Or perhaps you want to zap a blemish or add a slick filter to an item shared by someone else. Either way, you have to import the item into your own Photos library first.

To do that, Control-click a thumbnail and choose Import from the shortcut menu. Photos dutifully adds the item to your Last Import album, where you can treat it like any other picture or video in your library: Edit it, add it to another album, include it in a project, and so on. Alternatively, you can double-click a shared image, click Edit (or press Return) to enter Edit mode, and then click Import in the message pane that appears. Next, make your changes to the image, and then click Done. If you want to add the edited version of a downloaded image to the shared album from whence it came, you need to add it to the shared album again.

The previous section explains how to download content from a public website created in Photos.

By now you’re getting the idea that using shared albums is a bit like having your own personal Facebook experience inside Photos, which is just the ticket for folks who are put off by the social-media behemoth. For example, subscribers can like or add comments to your goodies, which kicks the value and fun factor up several notches.

To like and comment on an item in a shared album in Photos for Mac, open the album, double-click a picture or video (or press the spacebar), and then click the + icon that appears in the picture’s lower-left corner (it looks like a thought bubble). When you do, a comment sheet appears. Figure 8-15 has more.

When someone likes or comments on a picture, all the album’s subscribers are alerted via their Macs’ Notification Center. Whenever you enlarge a picture, you see a tiny number at its lower left that lets everyone know how many comments await your reading pleasure. To view comments your subscribers have made, simply click the + icon at the picture’s lower-left corner.

Figure 8-15. Click the smiley-face icon to like a picture or video, or click in the comment field and type whatever you like. Click Send, and Photos adds your comment to the list shown here. To delete a comment, point your cursor at it, and then click the Delete button that appears.

To like an image or add and view comments in Photos for iOS, tap to open the shared album, and then tap the picture itself to open it. Beneath the picture, you see the controls shown in Figure 8-15, which let you like the image, view comments, and add your own. To delete a comment, tap and hold your finger down on it, and then tap the Delete button that appears just above the comment.

If more than one Mac- or iOS device-using person lives under your roof—or if you share your Mac with one or more people—iCloud Family Sharing is the best thing since sliced bread. As you learned on Photos for Families, using Photos in a family situation is a complicated matter: You quickly end up with multiple Photos libraries and nobody remembers which pictures live where.

Apple’s solution is called Family Sharing, which lets you create a special group that you invite family members to join. The end result is an album named Family in Shared view that everyone in the group can access (it can’t be shared with anyone outside the group). Family members can easily add or remove their own pictures and videos, which are viewable and downloadable by everyone else in the group. This special album is also accessible on the Web; just visit www.iCloud.com and sign into your iCloud account to see all the goodies it contains (handy for those rare occasions when you’re not parked in front of your Mac or clutching an iOS device).

If you think about it, this solution is brilliant. By using Family Sharing, each family member maintains his or her own Photos library and gets to choose what’s shared with everyone else. This gives each member of the group some level of privacy while you, Family Commander-In-Chief, have access to shared items and can include them in projects such as saved slideshows (Chapter 6), or books, calendars, and cards (Chapter 9).

Setting up Family Sharing is a multistep affair. For example, if you share your Mac with anyone else, each person who uses it needs his own Mac user account. As Photos for Families explains, this grants each person his own Photos library (see https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18891 if you need help creating user accounts). Next, everyone involved needs their own Apple ID, you need to create a Family Group, and then you need to invite the family members to join the group. Grab a beverage, and then follow these steps to accomplish all that:

Now you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your family-sharing labors. This really is the only sane approach for managing multiple Photos-using people in your immediate family. Remember though, this isn’t the way to share content with just anyone: As you recall, you entered a credit card that’s now shared by all the family members in your group. Consider yourself warned.

In Photos for Mac, select the thumbnail of the image you want to use as your desktop picture, click the share icon, and then choose Set Desktop Picture. Ta-da! Next topic.

Well, there’s a tiny bit more to it, but not much. If your photo isn’t the same aspect ratio (How to Crop, Straighten, and Flip a Photo) as your monitor, OS X fits it to the width of your monitor, centers it, and chops off the top and bottom. For that reason, you may want to crop your chosen masterpiece (see The Rotate Tool) to the shape of your monitor—or relatively close to it.

Also, be sure to pick a photo that has enough pixels to fill your screen, or else you’ll see jagged blocks instead of a smooth picture. To learn your monitor’s pixel dimensions, choose →System Preferences→Displays. In the pane that appears, turn on the Scaled radio button; in the list that appears, the topmost item is your monitor’s resolution. Back in Photos, you can see a picture’s dimensions using the Info panel (The Mighty Info Panel). For the best results, make sure the desktop picture you pick has at least as many pixels as your monitor.

In Photos for iOS, select the picture you want to use as your lock screen or home screen. (The lock screen is the one you see when you first wake up your device; the home screen is what appears behind all your app icons while you’re using your device.)

Next, tap the share icon and, in the pane that appears, tap “Use as Wallpaper” (you may have to scroll sideways to see this option). Drag to position the photo, and use the pinch gesture (The Very Basics) to set its scale. Choose whether you want Perspective Zoom—the effect that moves your photo slightly as you tilt your device—on or off (if you get seasick easily, leave it off). Finally, tap Set, and then choose whether to use this photo on your lock screen, home screen, or both.

Exporting content from Photos is incredibly easy. If you don’t want to change the picture’s dimensions or file format, just drag its thumbnail onto your desktop, onto a folder icon on your desktop, or into an open Finder window (as you drag, you see a slightly see-through version of the thumbnail next to your cursor). The resulting file is named the same thing it was in Photos, though you can always rename it by clicking its name and entering something else.

You can also drag a picture into a message in the Mail app, or into a document in Pages, Keynote, any of the Microsoft Office apps, and so on. However, for professional publishing in non-Apple apps—all eyes are on you, Adobe—it’s best to export your pictures using the Export command (explained next) and then import them into your documents.

To change the dimensions and file format of your pictures, you need to use the Export command. Use the techniques described on Selecting and Hiding Files to select some thumbnails, or press ⌘-A to select the contents of a whole album, and then choose File→Export→Export [number] Photos or press Shift-⌘-E. (If you have got thumbnails of videos and pictures selected, the command changes to read “Export [number] Items” instead.) The next thing you see is the Export sheet shown in Figure 8-19.

Figure 8-19. The first export sheet you see doesn’t give you very many options; you have to expand it by clicking the icon circled here to see everything. When you do, you see these options, which let you specify file format, quality, and the pixel dimensions of the exported files. You can choose to include any titles, keywords, and descriptions you’ve added in Photos (as well as any location info the picture includes) as metadata. And the last section lets you specify a naming scheme for the resulting files and whether you want them tucked into subfolders.

Here are your export options: