Some years ago I designated iPhotos as my master digital photo repository. iPhoto was the photo app that came with my MacBook Pro. As a first step, I had to understand how the app worked so that I could organize the photos how I liked to see them.
By default, iPhoto would group my photos by “event”, or in other words, by the date the photos were taken OR imported onto my computer (i.e. Email downloads or sometimes transferring from one device to another). Initially I thought this was kind of confusing and not all intuitive to how I would think to find photos.
However, I quickly learned how to rename events and group them together in a way that made more sense to me. Often I liked to group photos together by location or activity, rather than the exact date they were taken.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the Event option, but it worked well enough. I intentionally avoided upgrading my operating system specifically because I didn’t want to use Photos, the new version of the iPhotos app.
The day I had LASIK, I mistakenly updated my operating system and ended up with Photos, likely because I was still on Valium and couldn’t really see. At first I couldn’t find any of the Events that I had spent hours preparing and naming meticously from iPhoto. I was so dismayed that I stopped organizing my digital photos and the pile up started.
I decided to work on my digital photos for my Spring Cleaning Challenge and that meant learning more about Photos. I quickly discovered a folder called “iPhotos” that contained all my events. However, Photos offers a variety of options to organize photos including Albums, Moments, Memories, Collections, Years, etc. I find the options overwhelming and I’m still making sense of them. Plus I now I have to integrate my old system of Events into whatever the equivalent is in Photos.
I’m still committed to aggregating all my photos in one place, but it’s going to take a bit longer to get there with the current options available. For a long time I always thought the biggest challenge with digital photos was the volume, but now I think we also lack adequate tools. I know that AI has made great improvements to help get through the volume faster, so maybe that will be a good option.
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