Take Control of Your Digital Photos [2 ed.] 9781947282216

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Read Me First
Introduction
Digital Photos Quick Start
Shoot Smart
JPEG
Raw
Raw + JPEG
Use a Geotag-Capable Camera
Geotag with a Tracking Device
Geotag Manually
Choose the Right Photo Management Application
Take Advantage of Software Intelligence
Memories
Text Search
Siri
Finding People
Text Search
Assistant
Albums
Import Your Photos the Smart Way
Lightroom Classic
Lightroom CC
Photos for Mac
Photoshop Elements
Change Where Lightroom Classic Stores Synced Photos
Make a Backup During Import in Lightroom Classic
Judge Your Photos
Star Ratings
Labels, Flags, and Favorites
Do Nothing
Hide the Photos
Delete the Photos
Assign Keywords and Other Metadata
Choose Good Keywords
Apply Keywords
Fix Incorrect Dates
Use a Geotagged Reference Photo
Merge Tracking Data
Identify People in Your Photos
Organize Photos into (Smart) Albums
Find Text
Search by Rating or Label
Search by Date
Find Metadata
Create Smart Albums
Go Mobile with Online Photo Services
iCloud Photo Library
Lightroom Mobile
Mylio (Cloudless Sync)
Google Photos
Amazon Prime Photos
Back Up and Archive
Back Up Image Files
Back Up Metadata
Online Backups
Migrate to Lightroom Classic CC
Step 1: Create a New Lightroom Classic Catalog
Step 2: Repair the iPhoto or Aperture Library
Step 3: Import the iPhoto or Aperture Library
Step 4: Add the Imported Photos to Your Main Catalog
About This Book
Acknowledgments
Shameless Plug
Credits
Copyright and Fine Print

Citation preview

EBOOK EXTRAS: v1.0

Downloads, Updates, Feedback

YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS

TAKE CONTROL OF

S R E V O C W NO S W O D N I W MAC AND

by JEFF CARLSON $14.99

Table of Contents Read Me First ............................................................... 4

Updates and More ............................................................. 4

What’s New in This Book .................................................... 5

Introduction ................................................................ 7

Digital Photos Quick Start ............................................ 9

Shoot Smart .............................................................. 12

Check and Set the Clock ................................................... 12

Clear the Memory Card .................................................... 14

Choose a Format ............................................................. 15

Geotag Your Photos ......................................................... 18

Choose the Right Photo Management Application ...... 20

Apple’s Photos for Mac ..................................................... 22

Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC ........................................ 24

Photoshop Lightroom CC .................................................. 28

Photoshop Elements ........................................................ 30

Mylio ............................................................................. 31

Jeff’s Recommended Application ........................................ 33

Take Advantage of Software Intelligence .................. 35

Photos for Mac and iOS .................................................... 36

Lightroom CC .................................................................. 42

Photoshop Elements ........................................................ 44

Google Photos ................................................................. 45

Import Your Photos the Smart Way ........................... 51

Apply Metadata at Import ................................................. 52

Choose Where Files Will End Up ......................................... 59

2

Judge Your Photos ..................................................... 63

Develop a Consistent Rating System .................................. 64

Cull Bad Photos ............................................................... 70

Assign Keywords and Other Metadata ....................... 74

Assign Metadata .............................................................. 74

Apply Geotags ................................................................ 86

Use Facial Recognition ...................................................... 98

Organize Photos into (Smart) Albums ..................... 106

Locate Your Photos Using Search ..................................... 106

Get Smart about Albums ................................................ 113

Remove Duplicate Photos ................................................ 122

Go Mobile with Online Photo Services ...................... 128

Set Online Photo Goals ................................................... 129

Choose an Online Service ............................................... 129

Back Up and Archive ................................................ 147

Back Up Your Photos ...................................................... 148

Archive Photos for the Future .......................................... 156

Migrate to Lightroom Classic CC .............................. 159

Moving from iPhoto or Aperture to Lightroom Classic .......... 160

Moving from Photos to Lightroom Classic .......................... 167

About This Book ....................................................... 170

Ebook Extras ................................................................. 170

About the Author ........................................................... 171

About the Publisher ........................................................ 172

Copyright and Fine Print .......................................... 174

3

Read Me First Welcome to Take Control of Your Digital Photos, version 1.0, published in February 2018 by alt concepts inc. This book was written by Jeff Carlson and edited by Kelly Turner. This book gives photographers using Mac or Windows computers the information they need to build and maintain a digital photo workflow that makes it easy to import, tag, rate, and store photos to find them quickly and easily later. It primarily covers macOS 10.12 Sierra, Windows 10, and iOS 10 or later versions. It helps you spend more time on the enjoyable aspects of photography—shooting and viewing your photos—and less on the mundane but essential task of managing all your photos. If you want to share this ebook with a friend, we ask that you do so as you would with a physical book: “lend” it for a quick look, but ask your friend to buy a copy for careful reading or reference. Discounted classroom and Mac user group copies are available. Copyright © 2018, Jeff Carlson. All rights reserved.

Updates and More

You can access extras related to this ebook on the web (use the link in Ebook Extras, near the end; it’s available only to purchasers). On the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy any subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.) • Read the ebook’s blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview.

4

If you bought this ebook from the Take Control website, it has been added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually; see Ebook Extras. Note: If you’re a Mac user and you’d like to review background information that might help you understand this book better, such as finding System Preferences and working with files in the Finder, read Tonya Engst’s ebook Take Control of Mac Basics.

What’s New in This Book

The world of photo software continues to change in dramatic ways. And with this revision, so has this book: it’s effectively a new edition of Take Control of Your Digital Photos on a Mac, but it was renamed to reflect the fact that it’s no longer limited to macOS (see the second bullet point ahead). Here’s how these changes are reflected in this edition: • I’ve updated nearly every chapter of the book to include information about the new Lightroom CC application that Adobe introduced in late 2017, as well as the rebranding of its predecessor as Lightroom Classic CC. As you’ll see in Choose the Right Photo Management Application, Lightroom CC is still in its early stages, but it’s clear that Adobe has big plans for it (enough to feature it as the top Lightroom choice in its marketing). And even with its limited features, the new addition is already quite good. • In general, I’ve made this book Windows-friendly, since photo management isn’t platform-specific. Aside from Photos for Mac, all the software I discuss runs on both macOS and Windows. I do mention the stock photo application on Windows 10, Microsoft Photos, but it’s so feature-sparse that it doesn’t really qualify to be in the running compared to the other applications. • I added Mylio to the list of applications to consider in Choose the Right Photo Management Application. 5

• Photoshop Elements is now included in the chapter about how to Take Advantage of Software Intelligence. • Photos imported into Lightroom Mobile apps and synced to Lightroom Classic CC are stored differently than images imported directly into Lightroom Classic CC. I explain why and how to make them all play nice in Change Where Lightroom Classic Stores Synced Photos. • Related to the previous item, the Lightroom Mobile section within the Go Mobile with Online Photo Services has been expanded and updated. • Added information on Merging Tracking Data in Windows, so you can record a geotracked trail and match up locations with specific photos by their timestamps.

6

Introduction You probably have a story like this. My mother took it upon herself to organize and digitize the family’s long-neglected stash of photos. Prints were pulled from proverbial shoeboxes, albums, and envelopes tucked in the backs of drawers. Black and white, sepia-tone, color; yellowed by age and old chemical processes; worn at the edges and vignetted in ways that today’s apps try so hard to emulate digitally. Most details of the people and places in the pictures were lost or had changed over time, but she had an advantage: flipping the photos over often revealed valuable information about the shots, usually scribbled in pencil as an afterthought because the photographer or family member at the time knew who and what was depicted. As we’ve embraced the digital photography revolution, there is nothing to flip over. The shots we capture are saved to memory cards and hard drives, and are infrequently printed. And we’re shooting more. It’s now far easier to take photos because decent-quality cameras are inexpensive and pocketable. Top-rate camera technology is embedded into most cell phones; the iPhone, in fact, still ranks as the most popular camera at the photo-sharing site Flickr. As a result, we’re drowning. No longer restricted by the length of frames on a film roll or the expense of paying to develop the bad shots along with the good, we capture many more photos. But then what? Too often, the shots are dumped into a computer with the best of intentions for sorting and organizing, but are then left scarcely examined or enjoyed. Life intrudes, more photos are captured, and time passes until you need to locate some shots that you vaguely remember taking. This is the point where you ask yourself, often in exasperation, “Why didn’t I organize these better? This shouldn’t be so difficult!” 7

And here’s where the new story begins. Taking control of your digital photos isn’t impossible. Although we have more photos to deal with, we also have much better tools to describe and organize them. In fact, your camera and photo management software can do some of the heavy lifting for you. By taking some deliberate steps before you go out shooting and when you import images, you’ll streamline what is normally a time-consuming task—making it more likely that you’ll do it. Best of all, you’ll be able to find images later without having to scan through every shot in your library. You’ll be able to “flip” the photos over and get the information you need. The process I describe stakes out the middle ground between a completely hands-off approach (letting the software organize imported photos by time and date alone, or with the help of automatic image analysis) and the labor-intensive, detail-oriented approach taken by some professional photographers. Although my approach embraces liberal use of keywords and other metadata, it also focuses on saving time and reducing complexity to ensure you develop a system you’ll really follow each time. (By the way, many of these techniques apply to the ever-increasing number of videos in your library, too.) For those who would like to spend even less time managing photos, I offer some suggestions for modifying the process throughout the book. What if you don’t want to go to even that little amount of trouble? Many applications have introduced features that analyze your photos for recognizable objects and assigns categories and tags—with no work on your part. The other component of any modern photo-organization scheme is cloud services. As mobile devices have become constant companions, we’ve come to expect all of our data—from photos to calendars and contacts—to always be available. When I wrote the first edition, many services for accessing photos on multiple devices were just starting up (and some have since consolidated or disappeared). Now, the field is more stable—and more interesting. With services such as iCloud Photo Library and Google Photos, you really can access nearly every digital photo you’ve captured on every device you own (provided you’re aware of some important tradeoffs). 8

Digital Photos Quick Start Here’s a quick overview of my recommended strategy, complete with links to different topics in the ebook, so you can jump to them quickly. Get started with the minimum amount of work: • New software features analyze your photos to identify objects and scenes, and categorize them without any effort on your part. Learn how to Take Advantage of Software Intelligence. • Check out the ideas under The harried photographer. Prep your camera: A bit of preparation before you head out the door will make things easier after you return with new pictures. In Shoot Smart, learn four actions that will get you started on the right footing. Get your app together: • Decide which application you’ll use to organize your digital photos in Choose the Right Photo Management Application. • Compare three common choices, and find out about Jeff’s Recommended Application. • If you still use iPhoto or Aperture and aren’t interested in making the switch to Photos for Mac—or if you’ve made the switch but would like to try something else, read Migrate to Lightroom Classic CC. Import the right way: Many people rush through the process of importing photos from a camera or memory card into the computer. However, this step is essential: see Apply Metadata at Import to learn how to assign, in one batch, valuable metadata to all images that come in during the import stage. Let the computer do the work for you!

9

Pick winners and losers: • Not every photo you take can be a winner, so the next step to a more manageable library is to Judge Your Photos and assign ratings. • Just as important: take a deep breath and Cull Bad Photos by removing or hiding them. Apply keywords and metadata: • After assigning as much metadata as you can during the import process, take a second pass to apply more specific keywords to individual shots (see Assign Keywords and Other Metadata, and don’t miss my advice on how to Choose Good Keywords). • If you used an external device such as an iPhone to collect GPS data while shooting, Apply Geotags shows how to merge that information with your photos. • We often want to find people in our photos. Learn how to Use Facial Recognition so the software collects shots of specific friends and family members. Search with smart albums: • A large virtual pile of photos, even organized by date, can still be an imposing mass (and mess). I recommend you Organize Photos into (Smart) Albums—containers that look like regular photo albums but whose contents change depending on criteria that you’ve specified. Using smart albums is like having a photo assistant who can dig through your archives to find what you want in a matter of seconds. • While searching your library, learn how to Remove Duplicate Photos. Go mobile: • Making photos available on mobile devices involves choices and tradeoffs. To find the right service for you, first Set Online Photo Goals to compare features.

10

• The service you choose can also depend on which ecosystem your desktop photo management app is part of. Choose an Online Service by looking at five of my top contenders. Protect your photos: • All this work is for nothing if a failing hard drive wipes out the one and only copy of your photo library. You absolutely, without question need to Back Up Your Photos with a strategy that backs up all your data, not just your photos. • Since there’s no guarantee the software you use today will function in 10 or 20 years, I talk about how to Archive Photos for the Future. The harried photographer: Sometimes, you may not find it possible to hit every step in the system I recommend. For those who find that too much complexity results in paralysis, or who face years and years of unmanaged photos, I lay out the bare minimum of how to get organized in a hurry. See The Harried Photographer: Keywords and Metadata, The Harried Photographer: Rating Photos, and The Harried Photographer: Organization. But keep in mind that you may end up just time-shifting some of the work—applying keywords later, for example, or spending more time scanning through your library for that “one” shot.

11

Shoot Smart It’s easy to think that taking control of digital photos begins when you import the images into your computer, but the truth is that the process starts before you capture your first shot. For example, time stamps are the foundation of photo management software, making it essential that your camera records the correct time. It is possible to fix errant time stamps later, but doing so throws a roadblock into your workflow. (And if enough roadblocks appear, you may decide to turn around and abandon the endeavor altogether.) The advice in this section isn’t complicated, but it goes a long way toward ensuring the photos you shoot will be cleanly imported.

Check and Set the Clock

How many digital clocks do you set on a regular basis? These days the number is small because our devices—computers, smartphones, iPads, even some televisions—configure the date and time automatically by getting the info from the internet. When Daylight Saving Time (DST) switches over, I need to change only a few holdovers such as the clock on my oven and an analog clock above the fireplace. Oh, and my cameras. Although they include options for indicating whether DST is on or off, I mistakenly assume that because they’re also computers (specialized computers, that is) they inherit the correct time when it changes. And every spring and autumn I invariably forget to change one, resulting in imported photos that appear in my library shifted by one hour. That may not seem like a big deal, but if you then also import images from a properly set camera—such as an iPhone— you’ll end up with photos jumbled out of order. Time and date stamps are the most crucial methods of organizing photos, so it’s important to get that information correct before you start shooting. When you travel to a new time zone, make a point of

12

updating the time-zone setting in your camera so you don’t end up with daytime shots marked as captured in the middle of the night. It’s even more important to make sure the time is correct if you’re also tracking your location using a GPS device or app, because you’ll need to match the camera’s and the device’s data for accurate reporting. Setting the time varies by camera model, but the basics are the same. Go to the camera’s settings menu, and look for a Setup or Tools category. Choose Set Clock or World Time or similar, and use the camera’s controls to set the correct time (Figure 1). I use my computer or iPhone as the basis for “real” time, since they’re automatically updated via the internet.

Figure 1: Set the correct time on your camera (Fujifilm X-T1

menu shown here).

Don’t forget to check the Daylight Saving Time setting! (It’s also known as Summer Time in Europe.) Most cameras offer an On/Off toggle. Having trouble remembering which part of the year is DST? Look outside: if the days are longer—spring and summer—DST is on; otherwise DST is off. (If you live in Arizona in the United States, or Iceland, Belarus, or Russia—or much of the rest of the world—which don’t subscribe to the time-change scheme, just leave the setting off.) 13

Clear the Memory Card

Another strategy before you start capturing photos is to clear your memory card (making sure you’ve already imported the photos currently stored on it, of course!). With the large capacities of today’s cards, it’s easy to keep adding photos during subsequent photo shoots, but resist that urge. When the time comes to import those shots into your computer, having several events slows down the import process: instead of applying a set of keywords and metadata to all photos in one pass, you end up importing groups of photos in waves, changing the associated information each time. Also, you don’t want to discover that your card is full while you’re in the middle of shooting and have to manually delete old pictures to make room for the new ones you’re missing. Tip: When you do need to clear the memory card’s contents, do it using the menus in your camera. Although photo management software can erase the images, it’s better to let the camera wipe the card using its own scheme to ensure compatibility.

When You Might Not Want to Clear the Card Suppose you’re on vacation with your camera and laptop. You import your photos each night to the computer, and then start fresh in the morning. Do you wipe the memory cards clean? I’d argue no: if something should befall that laptop, your shots are gone. If you don’t have secondary copies of those images, keep the photos on the cards as backups. Memory card prices are low enough that you can carry several and consider them like the film rolls of the pre-digital era. When I go on long photo workshops, I carry a WD MyPassport Wireless, an external hard disk that includes an SD card slot and Wi-Fi built-in. When I insert my memory card, its contents are automatically copied to the disk. Automatically uploading photos to a service like iCloud Photo Library counts as a backup, but don’t assume you’ll have fast internet access when you’re out and about. As you’ll discover in Back Up and Archive, I believe you can’t have too many backups, especially of your photos. 14

Choose a Format

All digital cameras save photos in the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format, which offers a good balance of image fidelity and compression (so you can store more images on a card). Many cameras, especially intermediate and pro models, also have the option of saving in raw format, which is the unedited data captured by the image sensor. I almost always shoot in raw to ensure I have the most flexibility when editing photos later. If your camera produces only JPEG images, don’t fret: you’ll still get good photos. JPEG does a great job of translating light to pixels. The advantages of raw appear only when you’re editing the files in software that works with it. Feel free to skip this discussion. This is a high-level overview of shooting in raw and JPEG formats, specifically as they pertain to managing your photos on the computer.

JPEG When you snap a photo, the camera’s processor interprets the light hitting the image sensor and immediately edits it to create an image that’s pleasing to the eye. It also compresses the file and writes it to the memory card. JPEG is fast and efficient, and is often favored by photographers who need really fast performance—for example, sports shooters capturing a dozen or more photos per second in burst mode. JPEG is also universally recognized by photo software and operating systems.

Raw This format is so named because you get the unedited data recorded by the image sensor. Raw—it’s not an acronym, even though it’s often incorrectly capitalized as RAW—is a generic way of referring to the native file type. Each camera manufacturer offers a custom raw format for nearly every camera. The benefit of shooting in raw is that you get a greater range of color and tone, because the camera’s processor isn’t interpreting the photo’s appearance and, crucially, isn’t throwing away image data, as JPEG compression does. 15

But choosing raw involves some tradeoffs, not only in terms of performance while shooting—raw files are much larger than JPEG files, so each shot occupies more space on the memory card and takes longer for the camera to process and transfer to the card—but also when incorporating the photos into your library. The raw specifications are closely guarded by camera manufacturers, and those companies aren’t always timely about sharing the specs with developers, even heavyweights like Adobe and Apple. That results in situations where a new camera comes to market, but no software (aside from the manufacturer’s own, which tends to be mediocre or sparse) is able to work with the raw photos for several weeks or longer. Fortunately, this lag has gotten shorter in recent years. Raw files also pack more information than JPEG files, so they take up more disk space on your computer. Normally this shouldn’t be an issue, because the amount of free disk space shouldn’t trump image quality. But if your only option is saving massive raw files generated by, say, a Nikon D850—which each take up approximately 42-92 MB, depending on the setting—to a small capacity SSD, you’re going to get frustrated.

Raw + JPEG Cameras capable of shooting raw can also shoot in a Raw + JPEG mode, which captures a raw file and creates a JPEG file of the same image. That sounds like overkill—you’re using much more storage by saving two versions of the same image—but some situations benefit from having both formats at the same time: • Some professional cameras can record to two memory cards simul-

taneously. That configuration enables the photographer to record the raw version of an image to one card and a JPEG version to the other card. For example, she can then submit the JPEG versions to editors or clients in a tight deadline situation, such as a sporting event where shots need to be published as soon as possible, and follow up later with the raw versions. • If you’re importing to an iPad or iPhone, a Raw + JPEG workflow

may make sense when you want to edit the shots before you get to 16

your computer. Prior to 2016, iOS didn’t recognize raw formats for editing; if you shot and imported only raw images, you actually ended up editing the low-resolution JPEG previews that the camera created. But when you import raw and JPEG pairs, iOS works with the high-resolution JPEG image and treats the raw file as an unalterable original. • Starting with iOS 10, shooting just in raw format is a possibility, but it still comes with caveats. The system can read raw files, though the capability to edit them natively is still up to third-party developers. Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Google’s Snapseed are examples of apps that can edit raw files. Even in those cases, however, the raw file itself isn’t touched; the apps keep track of which edits were made and send that information with the raw file to a synchronized application to reproduce the same results, such as between Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic CC on the desktop. In the case of Snapseed, edits are saved back to the Photos library (with your permission) so all devices subscribed to the same iCloud Photo Library account view the same edited version. You can always revert to the original raw file. (I go into this topic in more detail in my TidBITS article Lightroom for iOS 2.4 Changes Mobile Photo Workflow.) • Cameras with built-in wireless communication enable you to transfer images directly to an iOS app, but in many cases only JPEG images can be sent (some recent camera models allow raw wireless transfers). Wireless transfer is wonderfully convenient, so it’s nice to have a high-resolution JPEG to share. When it’s time to import the raw and JPEG files into your photo management software, the two files are usually treated as one image. However, some applications give you control over whether you want to split them and import just the raw file, for instance. (I go into more detail in Import Your Photos the Smart Way.)

17

Geotag Your Photos

Photos capture not only moments in time but places, too. People exclaim, “I want to be there,” when seeing a fantastic travel photo, but often “there” isn’t listed or it’s something generic, such as “Australia.” Now, you can record and share the exact location a shot was taken using GPS technology. Many photo applications, as well as sites such as Facebook and Flickr, read that information and plot image locations on a map, or use it to filter search results (such as displaying all photos taken in Adelaide). We’re not yet at the point where every camera includes a GPS sensor, but we’re inching closer. In the meantime, you can also use dedicated GPS tracking devices to record the data, or employ the GPS capability of the iPhone to keep tabs on your location.

Use a Geotag-Capable Camera The iPhone, cellular-capable iPads (which also include GPS hardware), and many other smartphones automatically record location data when a picture is captured. Some photo-viewing applications can then use this location data to place photos on a map. A few cameras include built-in GPS hardware, while others offer ports to connect manufacturers’ GPS adapters. The advantage of these approaches is that the geotag information is embedded in the image file that you capture, so it travels with the picture from the camera to your computer. You don’t need to do anything else.

Geotag with a Tracking Device Alternatively, you can record location data separate from the camera using a dedicated GPS device or a GPS app on the iPhone or iPad. To make this work, you start tracking at the beginning of your photo shoot and stop when you’re finished, saving a record of your locations during that time. When you return to your computer and import your photos, you also import the GPS data (usually a specially-formatted text file with a .kmz 18

extension). Photo software—such as Lightroom Classic or a standalone app such as HoudahGeo—analyzes the time stamps on the photos and the GPS data and matches the location information. (I discuss this in more detail in Apply Geotags.) Taking this route makes it even more essential that you update your camera’s clock and synchronize it with the GPS device.

Geotag Manually If tracking every step sounds like overkill or not worth the time required to merge the data—and you own a smartphone (or cellularcapable iPad)—you can still take advantage of GPS. After you capture some photos using your regular camera, take a quick snapshot using the phone. The photo itself doesn’t need to be great, because what you’re really after is the GPS data embedded in it. When you’re managing your photos on the computer, you can copy the location from that picture and apply it to the ones you shot using your main camera.

19

Choose the Right Photo Management Application Although it’s possible to dump photos into a folder on your computer and call that “organization,” this is one case where I don’t recommend a do-it-yourself approach. My photo management strategy relies heavily on software to organize images and apply essential metadata. The time you save when tagging and searching for images, in my opinion, justifies the price of a good photo management program. But which one? I’d love to say, “Go get this one program and you’ll be set,” but that’s not realistic: your photo library may already be stored in an application that makes it difficult to transition; or you may need something with more image-editing features than other programs. There are several interesting options for managing photos; however, their features vary widely: some are designed just for speeding up the import process, some offer a photo-focused view of folders on your disk, and some are self-contained photo management libraries. Because it’s impractical for me to list every program out there, I’ve focused on the features that I consider most essential for effectively managing a photo collection. (I’ll discuss some programs that meet these criteria—and identify my preference—in a moment.) If you’re unhappy with your current photo organizer and are looking for a better option, keep this feature list in mind: • Ratings: The ability to quickly identify which photos are better than others, without having to scan through them every time, is key. Most applications offer a scale of zero to five stars, plus an easy way to assign the rating, such as pressing a number key (4) or shortcut key combination (⌘-4). Some applications offer additional ways to differentiate photos, such as applying a flag, marking an image as a favorite, or applying colored labels. Others go in the opposite direction, eschewing ratings in favor of a single Favorite setting, as is the case with Apple’s Photos app. 20

• Keywords: Tagging photos with keywords lets you give context to photos and helps locate related images later. I place a high value on applying and creating keywords quickly and easily; if too many steps are involved, you’re less likely to use keywords. (If you reflexively roll your eyes when someone mentions applying keywords to photos, be sure to see Take Advantage of Software Intelligence for alternatives.) • Metadata at import: Just as important as having keywords is adding them to photos during the import process. As you’ll see in Import Your Photos the Smart Way, you can save a lot of time by making the software assign keywords and other metadata while it’s ingesting images, so you don’t have to remember to do it later. • Smart albums: I firmly believe the computer should do most of the grunt work while I enjoy my photos, which is why I like to use smart albums—saved searches that locate and display photos based on criteria I specify—instead of having to manually sort photos into standard albums. Similarly, I’m a fan of software AI features that automatically identify objects and scenes in your photos. • Offline media: Photos take up a vast amount of storage. At some point you won’t want (or won’t be able) to keep your entire library on your computer’s disk, requiring a shift to external storage, such as a removable hard drive. A good application will handle offline media with ease: It should provide thumbnail images of photos that aren’t available and make it possible to assign metadata without the originals present. When the external disk becomes available again, the app should acknowledge it and let you work with the photos as usual. That way, your entire collection remains intact from your perspective instead of being fragmented among separate libraries on several disks. • Portability: The application should offer an easy way to export or move photos while keeping intact the metadata you worked so hard to apply. • Mobile/cloud library access: Do you want to view photos you shot years ago on your phone or another computer? The options for 21

synchronizing photos among devices are often limited to the ecosystem around the desktop application you choose; for example, iCloud Photo Library works only with Photos for Mac and Photos for iOS. See Go Mobile with Online Photo Services for more information. • Potential longevity: As customers, we don’t have a lot of control over this aspect, but I recommend looking for software that’s likely to stick around. You don’t want to invest time into a program and then realize that it’s no longer being updated. Large companies with a history of photo-related software development have an edge here, because in theory they have more resources to keep development active—though even big companies can falter or change directions. Non-Destructive Editing Is Key Although this feature doesn’t pertain directly to managing your photo library, I think it’s essential in a photo application. You should be able to apply any number of creative or crazy edits to a photo and yet always have the option to revert to the original, untouched image.

With that criteria in mind, let’s look at how specific applications stack up: Apple’s Photos for Mac (next), Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop Lightroom CC, Photoshop Elements, and Mylio. Each of these programs meets (most of) the criteria I’ve laid out. However, if you already use something you like that isn’t on this list, by all means stick with it—the goal of this book is to establish a workflow that makes it easy to locate photos later, not to railroad you into one application.

Apple’s Photos for Mac

Photos for Mac replaced iPhoto and Aperture as Apple’s only photo management app. In the first edition of this book, I included iPhoto because it was likely the most-used tool—but I wasn’t kind to it and I omitted it from the second edition. Photos is, in many ways, a better application than iPhoto—it’s certainly faster, and has some impressive synchronization capabilities thanks to  its cloud-based component, iCloud Photo Library—but it doesn’t meet 22

all my requirements for a full-featured photo manager. Here’s how it stacks up to my list: • Ratings: Whereas iPhoto and Aperture offered a scale of zero to five stars for rating photos, Photos dispenses with star ratings entirely in favor of marking photos as favorites. That’s still a way to elevate good shots above mediocre ones, but it’s awfully simplistic. You can also reject a photo by hiding it (or deleting it, of course). • Keywords: In Photos you apply new or existing keywords via an Info window, which isn’t visible by default. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to terms, enabling you to tag an image just by pressing a key (such as L for leaves, or using numbers 1–5 for 1 Star, 2 Star, etc.)—but, inconveniently, only when a separate Keywords floating window is visible (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Applying keywords using shortcuts works only when the optional Keywords floating window is visible.

• Metadata at import: Photos doesn’t offer any options other than transferring your photos during the import process, although you can apply metadata to the photos in the Last Import album easily. • Smart albums: Photos does offer smart albums, which are easy to set up and access.

23

• Offline media: Photos imported from a camera or memory card can’t be stored on a separate volume—they’re put in Photo’s monolithic library file (actually, it’s a package that contains files and folders, but for practical purposes is treated as one file). If you import photos from a disk, though, you can reference the images in their original locations (via a setting in Preferences). • Portability: Photos stumbles in the portability category. Although you can export photos easily, only JPEGs take their metadata with them. Original raw files can be exported, but any keywords or titles you assigned are ignored. Even third-party developers can no longer access metadata. And because the photo library is stored in one big file, it’s even more difficult to access individual photos from outside of Photos. • Mobile/cloud access: Photos is actually a standout in this regard, with great synchronization via iCloud Photo Library. • Longevity: Photos is an integral part of iCloud Photo Library, so it will likely stick around for a while. It will also (hopefully) become more full featured with time. Microsoft Photos I originally wanted to include Microsoft Photos, the application that

ships with Windows 10, because it’s the default option for most

people using Windows. However, there just isn’t much there there.

It’s a speedy way to view the photos on your computer, including

local versions of cloud-based files such as those on Microsoft One-

Drive, but there’s no way to rate or favorite images, no smart

albums, no keywords…it just doesn’t stack up.

Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC

Although Adobe crams “Photoshop” into the product name for branding reasons, Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC is quite different from its industrial-strength image-editing sibling. Lightroom was designed to process raw files efficiently and give professionals a way to manage 24

photo libraries. It doesn’t hurt that the Lightroom developers can tap the shoulders of the Photoshop developers and incorporate great editing features, too. (Lightroom and Photoshop complement one another, but the former’s tools are now so good that I rarely find myself editing an image in Photoshop.) Note: Lightroom Classic is separate from Lightroom CC, which Adobe introduced at the end of 2017. Lightroom Classic is the latest version of the application that has borne the Lightroom name for more than a decade; Lightroom CC is an all-new application engineered around a cloud workflow; see Photoshop Lightroom CC.

Here’s how Lightroom Classic measures up: • Ratings: Lightroom Classic offers a scale of zero to five stars, a flag for identifying picks, the capability to mark photos as rejected, and six customizable color labels. • Keywords: Lightroom Classic’s keyword support is extensive, giving you two separate panes for adding tags (you can type directly into a field that auto-completes words as you type or choose from a list). Lightroom Classic also has customizable keyword sets. Inside each set are nine keywords that you define and then apply by pressing Option and a number key (Figure 3).

25

Figure 3: Pressing the Option key with a number key assigns keywords from the selected set.

For example, the included Outdoor Photography set has keywords such as Landscape, Wildlife, and Flowers & Plants. The Wedding Photography set includes Bride, Groom, Reception, and others. Pressing Option-6 in these examples would apply either Landscape or Bride, depending on which set is active. Having multiple sets saves time otherwise spent typing terms for tags you frequently use. • Metadata at import: Lightroom Classic can apply metadata during import, including presets that you choose. For example, I have a “Jeff Standard” set that includes the keyword jeffcarlson and IPTC data such as my contact information. I also create sets for specific projects that contain terms relevant to them, such as when I’m taking photos of products. • Smart albums: Lightroom Classic’s implementation, which Adobe calls Smart Collections, is thorough and lets you nest search criteria (making it possible, for example, to locate all photos tagged with Disneyland, shot using a Nikon camera, and marked with a Red or Blue label). 26

• Offline media: Lightroom Classic notes that an image is offline, but doesn’t get stressed about it. You can still view the photo, and read and edit its metadata (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Offline photos are visible and even editable in some

circumstances.

Lightroom Classic also offers a feature called Smart Previews, which creates proxy photos that are about 5% the size of the original. You can make image adjustments even when the original image is offline; since the changes are non-destructive, they’re applied to the image when you reconnect the volume on which it’s stored. • Portability: Lightroom Classic uses a database to track where photos are stored, but doesn’t try to keep them in one large library file—I can easily browse my disk structure to locate images if I need to. It also supports saving metadata to sidecar files (leaving raw files unaltered) or into the JPEG images. • Mobile/cloud access: Lightroom Classic syncs with the Lightroom Mobile app in iOS and Android devices via Adobe’s Creative Cloud service. It doesn’t offer the same full-library access as iCloud Photo Library, but it’s great for reviewing photos away from the desktop. • Longevity: Lightroom is currently the leader in this category of software, and Adobe supports it fully. I don’t see it going away anytime soon. 27

A House Full of Lightrooms There are actually three versions of Lightroom now. Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC include features that tie into Adobe’s Creative Cloud (hence the CC) network and are available only as a subscription. Lightroom 6 is roughly the same software as Lightroom Classic but without the Creative Cloud features; it also doesn’t include the Dehaze tool. However, Lightroom 6 is sold as a standalone purchase, not a subscription, and as of December 2017 is no longer being developed. Personally, I subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives me the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop for as little as $10 a month.

Photoshop Lightroom CC

If you subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan, you have two versions of Lightroom at your disposal. Lightroom CC is the new Lightroom application that Adobe built from scratch. It shares many (but not all) of the features of Lightroom Classic, and is designed with the cloud in mind. Everything you import into it is synchronized to Creative Cloud and made available on to Lightroom all your devices, including Lightroom Classic if you’re running it. In fact, I think Lightroom CC is pretty great—enough to write an entire book about it: Take Control of Lightroom CC! The application is fast and streamlined, while still containing the core Lightroom editing features and experience. Particularly for enthusiast photographers who haven’t yet jumped into something like Lightroom Classic, I think Lightroom CC is a great solution. That said, when evaluated against our criteria for being a good library manager, it’s still taking some of its first steps. I expect that, at some point, maybe in the next few years, Lightroom CC will catch up to Lightroom Classic’s functionality, which is partially why I’m including it here (and because anyone with access to Lightroom Classic can also use Lightroom CC). It is possible to fully migrate an existing Classic

28

library into Lightroom CC; if you’re considering it, be sure to read the chapter on that topic in my other book. All right, let’s dive in: • Ratings: Mark photos with one to five stars, or as picks or rejects. • Keywords: As of Lightroom CC 1.2, keywording is quite basic. You can enter terms in a field in the Keywords panel, but that’s it. In fact, keywords you applied in Lightroom Classic are stripped out of photos that are synced via Creative Cloud. • Metadata at import: Lightroom CC’s Import window includes none of the metadata options found in Lightroom Classic. You can only choose which photos to import, and optionally include them in a new or existing album. • Smart albums: None. I hope this is a feature on Adobe’s roadmap for Lightroom CC that just didn’t get implemented for version 1.0 • Offline media: This is one area where I think Lightroom CC performs better than Lightroom Classic. If you choose to store local original files on an external hard disk, and then disconnect that disk, Lightroom CC fetches what it needs from Creative Cloud when you’re editing. Any new images you import while disconnected—say you’re traveling with a laptop—are kept on the machine temporarily; when you reconnect that external disk, the application moves the files automatically. • Portability: By default, Lightroom CC keeps everything in its own managed location, but specifying an external location for originals makes them more easily accessible. • Mobile/cloud access: Lightroom CC was built from the beginning to work with Creative Cloud. As long as you have an internet connection, you can access your entire library from any Lightroom CC client, whether that’s on a Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android device. However, photo storage adds up, and paying for a lot of cloud data (up to 10 TB) can get pricey. • Longevity: Adobe’s marketing is pushing Lightroom CC as the preferred photo tool, even as it continues to actively develop and 29

improve Lightroom Classic. Adobe has a long-term commitment to the application and the ecosystem it has built.

Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements started life as a “Photoshop Lite,” an inexpensive image-editing alternative to the full-blown Photoshop. Over the years, as more people embraced digital photography, Photoshop Elements broadened its scope to include photo management too. The addition of a second application, the Elements Organizer, put it into the same category as the other programs I mention in this chapter. However, it stumbles in a few places, making it less than ideal: • Ratings: The Organizer offers zero to five stars, but no option to reject, flag, or label photos. • Keywords: Keywords can be applied by typing in a field like many other applications. If you’re masochistic, you can create keywords first and then drag them to photos. But you’re not. • Metadata at import: The Import window includes the option to apply just creator and copyright information to incoming photos (Figure 5). You can also apply a metadata template to incoming photos, though you have to set up that information in the separate Elements Editor app before you import. You can’t add keywords during import.

Figure 5: Photoshop Elements offers very few options for applying metadata at import.

30

• Smart albums: The Organizer’s version of a smart album is called a saved search, and it operates similarly to a smart album except for one key difference: you can’t edit it later. If you want to change the parameters of a saved search, you have to duplicate it, edit the criteria, and save it as a new saved search. • Offline media: The Organizer indicates when an image is offline, but when you view the image larger, the software pops up a dialog that attempts to search for the original. So although you can still view a low-resolution version, it’s a hassle. • Portability: Photos are not stored in a central location, as with Photos for Mac, making it easy to locate images outside of the program. You can also save metadata to image files or to separate XMP sidecar files. • Mobile/cloud access: Surprisingly, Photoshop Elements has taken a step away from mobile synchronization. Adobe discontinued its Revel online service, which was once wired into the Elements Organizer. Although Adobe’s Creative Cloud infrastructure syncs photos between CC applications such as Lightroom, Elements has been ignored. • Longevity: Photoshop Elements, now at version 16, is a stalwart of Adobe’s imaging applications and anchors the introductory end of the photo-editing lineup.

Mylio

I first learned of Mylio at a photography event where a prominent speaker mentioned that he didn’t use Lightroom or Aperture, and instead organized his library using Mylio. It’s a cross-platform organizer and editor that has a particularly intriguing feature: it syncs between computers and devices over a local network, not a cloud service. (See Mylio (Cloudless Sync) for details.) Although I don’t think its editing features compare to Lightroom’s, it ticks many of my qualifications for a library organizer. If you’re resistant to using Photos or Lightroom 31

and you’re looking for a library organizer, it may appeal to you. Here’s the breakdown: • Ratings: Photos can be ranked from zero to five stars, flagged as picks, and assigned color labels. • Keywords: A Keywords pane in the Info panel lets you type the terms you want, separated by commas. • Metadata at import: Add keywords, rename files, and choose from a handful of folder organization schemes. You cannot, however, choose which photos to import; they’re all added in the import process (although Mylio does ignore duplicates you’ve already imported). • Smart albums: None. • Offline media: Mylio supports importing photos from external drives, but the process can be confusing, and you need to take extra steps to control how and where it stores thumbnails, previews, and originals. • Portability: All edits and metadata are saved in .xmp “sidecar” files that are stored with the originals, so as long as you were to move to an application that recognizes that structure, you’d be able to transfer your library easily. • Mobile/cloud access: Mylio has no cloud component, but you can set it up so that Mylio on other computers can sync via the internet. You can also set up a Google Drive or Amazon Drive to be an online image repository. • Longevity: I honestly can’t predict Mylio’s longevity. In an informal poll of readers of my website and my newsletter subscribers, Mylio didn’t garner a vote. At the outset, Mylio looks like a direct competitor to Lightroom. It can organize your entire photo library, edit images (including many raw formats), and perform many of the tasks we want in a modern application. However, since I think Lightroom Classic is a better all-around tool, I still prefer it. 32

Import Tools, Directory Viewers, and Things to Come The field of photo tools is much broader than the list of apps I’ve included here, but I’ve left out a few notable contenders because, although they do their respective jobs well, they don’t offer the full range of photo management features I consider essential. Photo Mechanic, for example, earns high regard by professionals because it’s an extremely fast tool for importing and tagging photos. However, it doesn’t manage your library, offer smart albums, or provide a way to view your entire collection of photos. Another category of apps that I call “directory viewers” is also available, which includes Adobe Bridge. They give you a photo-centric view of files in a disk’s folders, and can track metadata. But they aren’t designed to encompass your library as a whole, which I think is a key capability of a good photo management system. For some photographers, that’s the preferred approach, giving them the most control over where files are stored. That also involves a lot more administrative work, though, something I’m deliberately trying to avoid in this book. Less friction, more fun. A few companies, as of the beginning of 2018, are actively building asset-management tools for their photo-editing applications, such as Luminar by Skylum and Serif’s Affinity Photo. Both companies have publicly announced that they’re working on components to manage one’s entire library, but haven’t set specific release dates for them.

Jeff’s Recommended Application

I’ve put a lot of time into each of these applications, but the one I use for my main photo library is Lightroom Classic CC. It includes all the features I want for organizing my photo library on the desktop, works on Mac and Windows, and, most importantly, makes it easy for me to easily find photos later. I’m not suggesting you rush out and subscribe to an Adobe Creative Cloud plan that includes Lightroom if you already have something that works. But if we were sharing a drink and you asked for my preference, Lightroom would be it. That said, I must offer an important caveat. If you use a Mac, and accessing your photos on mobile devices or other Macs remotely is 33

important to you, Photos for Mac with iCloud Photo Library is a good choice. (There are other considerations for mobile photos, so be sure to read Go Mobile with Online Photo Services.) Note: At the end of this book, I provide advice on how to Migrate to Lightroom Classic CC Classic CC.

34

Take Advantage of Software Intelligence The system I describe in this book is designed to give you the most control over your photo library, enabling you to easily locate your images whenever you need them. It’s also designed to require as little of your time as possible, because we all know from experience that if organizing photos takes too much time, we’re far less likely to continue doing it. Sometimes, though, even that is too much. The simple truth is that most people don’t organize their photo libraries beyond storing them or perhaps making an album or two. And that’s okay. Even I fall into this camp at times, not always properly tagging my photos after I import them due to lack of time or energy. (However, as I describe in Apply Metadata at Import, I do take advantage of import settings that perform a lot of the work for me.) Clearly, I’m not alone, because the biggest push in photo organization recently has been identifying the contents of photos using machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI). We’ve seen this already with facial-recognition features that find specific people in images. The newest AI features go even further, recognizing things like trees, snow, animals, and many other objects and scenes. Instead of trying to remember when you took a ski trip years ago, for example, you can quickly narrow the search by finding all photos with snow in them. In this chapter, I show you how to use these AI-based features to locate your photos without relying on edited metadata. These features don’t eliminate the benefit of other organization strategies—you’ll still better take control of your photos by judging, assigning keywords, and organizing your photos using the advice throughout this book—but AI can give your searches an additional boost. 35

Photos for Mac and iOS

If you’re invested in Apple’s Photos ecosystem on the Mac and in iOS, you’ll be interested to know that the latest versions have made strides toward helping you locate photos using minimal work on your part.

Memories I’ve always liked the idea of having a “photographic memory,” but in reality it would be annoyingly tedious: who wants to remember all the mediocre shots? For the Memories feature, Photos collects highlights for time periods or locations (chosen by the application without input from you). Select Memories in the sidebar to see what Photos has cooked up for you (Figure 6).

Figure 6: For Memories, Photos automatically creates collections of images based on dates, as here, or other metadata.

Double-click a memory to reveal the images and videos in it. At the top is a slideshow summary, followed by the photos and videos themselves. The app also identifies people, plots any location-tagged photos on a map, and offers related memories (Figure 7). For “Best of” memories, Photos most often selects shots you’ve marked as favorites, but not exclusively. 36

Figure 7: Memories include a lot of related information. Note: In iOS, you can edit a memory’s slideshow by choosing which images and videos appear, changing the title and lettering style, and choosing music. Select the slideshow, tap the screen to reveal controls, and tap the Edit button. However, only the title treatment synchronizes back to the Mac. There’s no control for editing the slideshow in the Mac version of Photos.

If a memory doesn’t strike your fancy, scroll to the bottom and click Delete Memory; the photos themselves aren’t removed. Or, if it’s a memory you want to come back to regularly, click Add to Favorite Memories to store it in the Favorite Memories album.

37

Block Bad Memories Does a memory bring up bad associations? Photos offers a way to

block memories, but it’s more like getting a lobotomy than using

selective memory. At the bottom of a memory, click Block Memory,

and then choose the type of memory from the pop-up that appears,

such as place, day, or holiday. Photos hides that memory and won’t

create new Memories entries based on that criteria. If you change

your mind, open the Photos preferences and click the Reset Blocked

Memories button.

Unfortunately, you can’t edit a memory by removing or adding images. If you delete a photo from a memory, it’s actually deleted from your photo library! (So don’t do that.) If you like the collection, but want to fine-tune it, consider creating a new album containing the shots. Select the photos you want, or select nothing to build an album with all of the images, and choose File > New Album. In the dialog that appears, give the album a name and click OK. Note: Photos for iOS has the same Memories feature, with a small

difference: the slideshow at the top doesn’t play automatically. You

need to tap the Play button to get it started. Also, if Photos is set to

optimize the device’s storage, expect a lag playing the slideshow

while the app downloads the higher-resolution versions of images

that aren’t stored locally.

Text Search If you add keywords to your images, a text search is the quickest way to locate them. But even without adding keywords, you’ll probably first turn to the Search field thanks to the AI features in Photos. Click the Search field in the top-right corner of the window, or press ⌘-F, and type a query, such as snow (Figure 8).

38

Figure 8: A text search reveals keywords and categories.

Photos brings up images that are tagged with keywords containing snow, as well as categories that it has created based on its AI, such as snowstorm. Search options include: • Descriptions: Type any text that could appear in the title, description, or keywords fields. • People: Type the name of a person you’ve identified using the app’s facial recognition features (see Use Facial Recognition). • Dates: Type a date to view photos from that time period, such as Nov 2012. Are you looking for a photo you know you shot in April but don’t recall the year? Type April to view all photos shot in that month for all years. • Locations: Type the name of a location to find photos tagged with GPS coordinates (like those shot with the iPhone). • Combinations: Combine terms to narrow your search, such as Glendale 2014 to bring up all photos shot in Glendale just for that year.

39

In my experience, the search results are usually about 80% correct— sometimes Photos will confuse a bright sand beach with snow, for instance, or make other near-misses. But the advantage is that you don’t have to work for any of those results. The application scans your library to find matches for the approximately 4,000 scenes and objects that it recognizes. (When you add a batch of new photos to your library, Photos spends time and processing power chewing on them just for this purpose, so don’t be surprised if Photos is consuming a lot of power in the background after import.) Missed Communication The search feature works the same in Photos on the Mac and in iOS, but there’s a curious wrinkle: even if you’ve enabled iCloud Photo Library, you could get different results on each of your devices. For privacy reasons, Apple chose to analyze the photos on each device separately, rather than uploading information to be processed to the cloud and sharing it among all of them. That leads to inconsistency. When I search for rain, for example, my Mac offers 142 results, including 122 in the category “Rain Forest.” On my iPad, the same search yields 144 results, including 128 in the category “Rainforest” (yes, spelled differently). My iPhone pulls in 155 results. I respect Apple’s commitment to privacy by not trolling through

people’s photo libraries on their servers, but it leads to a weakened

user experience.

Siri In 10.12 Sierra and later on the Mac, Apple’s voice assistant stands ready to peruse your photos using the same search features found in the Search field. In fact, the Photos application doesn’t even need to be open to ask Siri to fetch images. Activate Siri on your Mac and ask for photos containing keywords, categories, or other information (click Siri in the Dock or the menu bar, press the Siri button on a TouchBar-enabled MacBook Pro model, or hold ⌘-Space on your keyboard). For example, say, “Show my favorite photos from last year.” Siri opens the Photos app and displays the

40

result (Figure 9). You can also combine parameters using natural

language commands such as, “Find photos of coffee in California.”

Figure 9: My favorite recent photos, courtesy of a Siri voice search.

As with other searches, Siri’s results can be hit or miss. I can say, “Show me photos from March 1, 2016” and get the correct results, but if I say, “Show me photos from this day one year ago,” I get a smattering of shots on and around that date. Apple is always working on Siri’s capabilities on their end, so I’m hopeful this type of recognition will improve over time.

Finding People Before computers started looking for familiar objects in photos, they focused on people. Algorithms for identifying faces in images soon led to matching specific people, making it much easier to find all photos in which a person appears. The only work you need to expend is naming people in some of your photos so the application can find them in other shots (see Use Facial Recognition). Click the People album in the sidebar. From the identified people that appear, double-click one to browse photos in which they appear (Figure 10). 41

Figure 10: Find all the photos containing a particular person.

After you’ve named someone, you can also type their name into the Search field to find photos that include them. For people you search for regularly, mark them as favorites so they always appear at the top of the People screen: when viewing the person’s photos, scroll to the bottom of the list and click Favorite This Person. Microsoft Photos and AI Even though Microsoft Photos doesn’t include ratings or keywording,

it does have some rudimentary AI features for identifying objects,

scenes, and people in images. It also puts together albums based on

related photos or locations, which you can add to your own list of

albums or store on OneDrive.

Lightroom CC

Adobe developed Lightroom CC as an online-native Lightroom experience. Its automatic synchronization of all your photos makes the images available on any device running a flavor of Lightroom. There’s another benefit, too: Adobe’s servers analyze the images for specific features using Adobe Sensei, a machine learning system that is the heart of Lightroom CC’s search features. 42

Text Search Performing a search in Lightroom CC brings up results based on the Title, Caption, Location, and Keywords fields, as you would expect. But it also responds to names of objects and scenes within the photos, even if you didn’t enter any of that information yourself. Click the Search field at the top of the window, or press ⌘/Ctrl-F, and type a query, such as snow (Figure 11).

Figure 11: Lightroom CC recognized that these are snowy scenes, even if there’s no snow in the metadata.

Adobe Sensei also plays a part in editing photos. When you click the Auto button in the Edit panel, the application uses data gleaned from hundreds of thousands of similar scenes (landscapes, portraits, and so on) to come up with pleasing results. In some cases, Auto is quite good. Unfortunately, search in Lightroom CC is based exclusively on Sensei, which means that if your computer is not online, you can’t search— even for keywords or titles you’ve applied. I’m hoping this is a temporary limitation that will be fixed in the near future. Currently, Lightroom CC does not include other machine-learning features such as finding people or curating memories and videos.

43

How to Opt Out of Sensei Analysis How does Adobe train Sensei to identify objects and scenes in photos? By throwing hundreds of thousands of images at it (that’s the “learning” part of machine learning). And where does Adobe get those images? We’re uploading them to Creative Cloud with every import we do in Lightroom CC (and Lightroom Mobile). Realistically, Adobe and Sensei aren’t singling out your particular images—it’s all fodder for the learning algorithms. But if you’re uncomfortable with your images being indexed this way, you can opt out. Adobe’s Machine learning FAQ describes how it uses the data it collects, and includes instructions for turning off machine learning for your account.

Photoshop Elements

The Elements Organizer’s variation on machine learning is a feature called Smart Tags, which analyzes scenes and assigns keywords. To view them, perform a search by clicking the Search button at the topright corner and then click the Smart Tags button (Figure 12).

Figure 12: The Elements Organizer assigns Smart Tags to photos based on their contents.

44

Google Photos

If you’re not invested in the Apple Photos ecosystem, Google Photos is a great service for making your library available on multiple devices. One reason to use it, as I explain in Go Mobile with Online Photo Services, is as an easy go-to backup of your images. (See that section for instructions on how to set up the service.) An even better reason is that Google Photos excels at making your photos searchable without any work on your part. Unlike Apple’s approach, Google Photos does all of its image analysis in the cloud. JPEG versions of your photos are uploaded and scrutinized for content by the petaflops-worth of global processing power at Google’s disposal. It identifies objects and scenes, matches faces, and even does fun things like make animations out of bursts of photos captured together. Truth be told, sometimes I’ll search for an image using Google Photos on my Mac or iOS device, and then use the filename of the result to locate the original shot in Photos or Lightroom. Or, if I want to share an older photo that’s stored in my Lightroom library (because it’s on an external drive at home, for example), I’ll download the Google Photos version and work with that. Note: I go into more detail in Go Mobile with Online Photo Services, but it’s important to remember that Google Photos doesn’t upload your originals unless you pay for storage; the default, free service creates high-resolution JPEG versions that occupy far less storage on Google’s servers.

Note: Amazon revamped its Amazon Prime Photos service in 2016 to offer many of the same features as Google Photos, such as identifying objects and people within photos, and generating its own keywords for easier searches. It’s not as comprehensive as Google’s offerings, but it’s better than the giant shoebox approach of previous iterations. See Go Mobile with Online Photo Services for details.

45

Text Search To locate photos on the Mac, access Google Photos via the web; in iOS, you need to run the dedicated Google Photos app. When you use the Search field in either system, you can type any term, select a person that appears in your library, choose from several automatic categories (such as Selfies), or choose a recent location (Figure 13).

Figure 13: Performing a search in Google Photos gives you more options than just typing search terms.

Google Photos completely forgoes manually assigning keywords to images, but that’s okay. The object and scene recognition is generally good enough to perform general searches. The results include Googlegenerated keywords, locations, and albums at the top, with individual photos and videos to follow (Figure 14).

46

Figure 14: Google Photos brings back several results for a term.

When you combine search terms, you can usually get results that match. For example, Jeff trees brings up photos where I appear (since I’ve already identified myself in photos as Jeff) in the same frame as one or more trees. This works for places, too, if a location has been set. Searching for waterfalls in Washington in my library displays matches. However, it also presents some waterfall photos I’ve shot in Oregon, because those shots don’t include location metadata. In general, I’d say searches in Google Photos tend to over-deliver results that you can easily sort through, rather than exclude items. Tip: Google Photos displays images that match the search results or album category, but you can also view the other photos that were shot with them. Click the Show More (^) control to reveal everything uploaded in the same batch.

47

Assistant Similar to the Memories feature in Apple’s Photos application, Google Photos’ Assistant presents several novel ways to revisit your photos. It happens automatically, such as with the Rediscover This Day feature that collects media from one or more years ago (Figure 15). The Assistant also works on its own schedule—or rather, Google’s distributed computing schedule—so don’t be surprised to find an album of images from a year and a half ago suddenly appear in the Assistant.

Figure 15: Rediscover photos taken on days from previous years.

Some of the creations are simply fun: movies built using media from a particular day, or themes such as “Smiles of 2016” that collects photos where people are smiling. Other creations handle post-processing tasks such as stitching panoramas from photos that were shot within a similar time period and have overlapping edges, or HDR (high dynamic range) composites generated by merging two or more identical shots that have varying exposure levels.

48

The items that appear in the Assistant are just suggestions and not permanent. If you want to keep one, click the Save to Library button. Or, click the X that appears when you position your pointer over an item to dismiss it. At the top of the page, you can create a new album, shared album, collage, or animation, and then select the media to appear in it.

Albums The Albums view of Google Photos includes collections you create yourself, as well as any Assistant-generated albums you’ve chosen to save. It’s also the place to browse photos based on their contents. Specifically, click the Things album to view albums of auto-assigned categories, such as Flowers or Concerts (Figure 16).

Figure 16: Google Photos creates albums based on categories.

49

How to Help Google’s Results When you view one of the categories in the Things album, you’re bound to find shots that don’t match well. To clear out the clutter, click the More Options button (Figure 17) and choose Remove Results. Next, select the checkmark button for each photo you want to banish and click the Remove button.

Figure 17: Not all photos match the search result (the two bottom left ones, for example), so you can remove the term from them. Next, select the checkmark button for each photo you want to banish and click the Remove button.

50

Import Your Photos the Smart Way Moving photos from a camera or memory card to the computer seems like mere transportation: bits captured and stored in one location are copied and saved to a new location. That sounds about as exciting as bringing groceries home from the market. But what if those groceries could assemble themselves into prepared meals by the time you delivered them to your kitchen? And what if your photos could organize themselves on the way to your disk by detailing what’s in each image, where it was shot, and by whom? Your computer can do more than just shuttle files from one location to another. By taking advantage of software’s capability to assign metadata during the import stage, much of the drudgery of organizing photos is handled upfront with minimal interaction required by you. And, you may also be able to set up your import such that you Choose Where Files Will End Up. The Harried Photographer: Keywords and Metadata I believe good metadata pays dividends later, which is why I suggest applying it during the import stage—even if you are in a hurry. This takes advantage of the software’s capability to tag images as it copies them to the computer. If your program doesn’t support this feature, do it right after import: in Photos for Mac, for example, select all the photos you just added (they’ll be the only ones visible, since the Last Import album is automatically selected after import) and type keywords related to the entire batch into the Info window. But then stop there—you can always add more-specific keywords later when you review the shots. (And if you’re using Photos for Mac, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom CC, or Google Photos, you can also take advantage of the automatic keywords they generate; see Take Advantage of Software Intelligence.) 51

Apply Metadata at Import

Computers were designed for grunt work, whether that’s decrypting World War II ciphers or batch-applying keywords to hundreds of photo files in one go. Yes, you can always manually add metadata later, but will you, really? Maybe for a few terms here and there (which is inevitable, and useful, as I cover in Assign Keywords and Other Metadata), but probably not for all the images in a shoot. Spending a tiny amount of time optimizing the import process— especially in applications that support metadata templates—gives you a tremendous advantage when locating photos down the line after you’ve moved on to the next batch of shots. Specifically, what items are we talking about? In Lightroom Classic (and Photoshop Elements in a limited way), you can apply the following metadata during import: • Keywords: Apply any descriptive terms for this set of photos that you are likely to search for later, such as the name of an event or landmarks that appear. For accuracy, include only keywords that apply to all the images being imported. For example, if I’m importing 100 photos of trains and my friend Mark Smith appears in 30 of them, I would not include the keyword mark smith during the import process. It’s better to add the tag to those 30 shots later than to do a search for “mark smith” at some point and turn up 70 images that don’t contain Mark. It’s also easier to add new terms later than to dig out errant ones. • IPTC metadata: If IPTC presets didn’t make it so easy, I’d likely never assign this identifying information to my photos. (IPTC stands for International Press Telecommunications Council, the group that established this model of assigning uniform metadata.) Many of the fields are specific to industries or projects (IPTC Subject Code, Intellectual Genre) but basic fields such as Creator, Contact Email, and Copyright Notice are useful to anyone. If you need to submit the file somewhere, such as a file-sharing site, that 52

information stays with the file (and can be useful for identifying ownership if someone swipes it when they shouldn’t). • Caption: I use this to include contextual information that applies to every shot I’m importing, such as “California Science Center” or “Family Vacation 2017,” knowing that it will show up when friends and family view the images I upload to social media sites. • Rating: In Lightroom Classic, you can assign a rating for everything, such as giving each photo one star (I explain the reasoning behind this in Judge Your Photos). Note: Not to get too far ahead of myself, but if you use Photoshop

Elements and want to add GPS tracking data to your photos to mark

their locations, you need to do that before you import the images.

See Merge Tracking Data for details.

Since some of this information—such as IPTC fields—typically remains the same from shoot to shoot, the best method of applying it is to create presets that fill in the data for you when the images are copied to your computer. You gain the benefit of valuable metadata without having to deal with it manually each time. Remember that this information is just a baseline—you can add specific keywords and other data in the import window before you begin the transfer. Dealing with Video Files I keep writing “photos” when talking about importing files, but today’s cameras are just as capable of capturing video footage. For the most part, applications treat videos the same as photos in terms of organizing them. You can rate, assign keywords, and apply other metadata such as IPTC and location information. Some applications also feature basic editing options, figuring correctly that you don’t want to send the file to another program just to trim the ends of clips before posting them to a sharing site.

53

Lightroom Classic Let’s look at an example of how this works by creating a new preset in Lightroom Classic: 1. Choose Metadata > Edit Metadata Presets. A dialog appears with fields for the metadata that Lightroom supports (Figure 18).

Figure 18: Creating a new metadata preset in Lightroom.

2. Fill in the fields you wish to be applied to the imported images. 3. From the Preset pop-up menu, choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. 4. Enter a name for the preset, and click the Create button. 5. Click Done to exit the dialog. In Lightroom’s Import window, expand the Apply During Import panel and choose your new preset in the Metadata field (Figure 19).

54

Figure 19: Choose your metadata preset during import.

Lightroom CC The import process in Lightroom CC is deliberately scaled down compared to Lightroom Classic, which is good for people who feel overwhelmed by all the options in Classic, but is disappointing for our needs. You can choose which photos to import, and optionally assign them to an album. However, you can sneak some metadata through the back door, after import: 1. Import a set of photos from your camera. They’re collected in a Recently Added category, which you can view by clicking the My Photos button (or pressing the P key) to view the My Photos panel (Figure 20).

55

Figure 20: Lightroom CC displays your most recently imported images in this special category.

2. Choose Edit > Select All. 3. Open the Keywords panel by clicking the Keywords pressing K.

button, or

4. Type keywords that apply to the entire selection into the Keywords field (Figure 21).

Figure 21: The Keywords panel is sparse, but it’s a good step

nonetheless.

5. Next, open the Info panel by clicking the Info the I key.

56

button, or pressing

6. With all of the photos still selected, enter any metadata that will be shared by all the images, such as caption information, copyright, and location. The data is applied to all of the photos.

Photos for Mac Photos offers no opportunity to apply any metadata during import. You can import all photos from a camera or memory card or you can select some to import. It pays attention only to the times the photos were captured. You’re not entirely out of luck, though. After the files transfer to the computer, Photos displays them together in the Last Import album, giving you an opportunity to quickly batch-apply metadata after import. Select all the photos (press ⌘-A), choose Window > Info (or press ⌘-I) to reveal the Info window, and enter keywords and location data (if it applies) (Figure 22).

Figure 22: Do an end-run around Photos by applying keywords to the batch of photos after they’re imported.

Photoshop Elements Photoshop Elements has metadata presets, too, but good luck with stumbling upon how to create them. The Import window in the Elements Organizer application (the component of Elements that manages your library) includes only a pop-up menu for choosing presets, not a way to actually create them.

57

Here’s the skinny: 1. Launch the Photoshop Elements Editor application (not the Organizer), and then open any image. 2. Choose File > File Info. 3. In the dialog that appears, enter the metadata you want to include. 4. Click the first pop-up button at the bottom of the window (to the right of Preferences; the name depends on what was last selected), and choose Export. 5. Give the preset a name and click Save. 6. Click OK to close the dialog and apply the metadata to the open image. To apply the preset during import in the Organizer, choose File > Get Photos and Video > From Camera or Card Reader. Click the Advanced Dialog button to reveal all the import settings, and then choose the preset that you created from the Template to Use pop-up menu under Apply Metadata. I know, the process is kind of ridiculous, but once the template is set up it will save you the trouble of applying that information later. Or, Apply Metadata after Import If you don’t want to bother with setting up presets in Photoshop Elements, you can apply metadata after importing. After new photos appear in the Last Import window, select them all and click the Keyword/Info button to display the Information sidebar. Click the Edit IPTC Information button that appears when multiple images are selected and fill in the fields in the dialog—it’s a smaller subset of IPTC fields, but that’s better than nothing.

58

Choose Where Files Will End Up

One of the core ideas behind some applications—including Photos for Mac—is that the software handles the organization for you. All imported photos are stored in one location on disk, and that location appears as a single library file. The notion is that you shouldn’t need to care where the actual image files are, because you’re interacting with the photos within the software. That approach isn’t terrible. However, it does have a couple of problems. One, photos continue to take up vast quantities of disk space at a time when many hard disk capacities are shrinking. Laptops and even desktop computers are moving to solid-state drives (SSDs), which offer fantastic performance but are still relatively short in the storage department. That means you need to split your library into pieces or relocate it to an external disk. Two, the fact that you’re reading this book means you’re not a photographic beginner, which means you don’t necessarily need software to hold your hand every step of the way. I’m not suggesting you need to be able to field-strip a laptop blindfolded and build your own OS kernel, but you probably want more control over where the software is putting your files. For example, Lightroom Classic on my machine saves files in a sensible way, stored in my user folder at ~/Pictures/[Year]/[Year]-[Month][Day]/. A photo named IMG1234.JPG captured on July 4, 2016, can be found at ~/Pictures/2016/2016-07-04/IMG1234.JPG. If Adobe were to cancel Lightroom today and make it stop working (if Adobe had some black-helicopter, joy-hating division, I suppose), I could easily traverse my photo library or point another application at it without extricating the files from the package folder. When possible, take advantage of the capability to specify where imported files will end up. This will give you more flexibility in how you deal with large libraries and archives. For example, on my computer, a MacBook Pro, imported photos are stored on a 1 TB internal hard disk, even though the bulk of my photo library exists on an external 59

drive. If I take my laptop to a coffee shop to work, the most recent imported photos are available for editing. And then, every month or so, depending on how many photos I’ve shot and how much free space is available on the internal disk, I move the older photos to the large external disk. (I do that within Lightroom Classic so the software keeps track of where the files are located.) Lightroom CC is even better in this regard. You can specify that your local original image files are stored on an external hard disk, and Lightroom CC keeps track of them. If you disconnect that disk—let’s say you take your laptop and head off on a photo adventure—and then import new photos to the laptop while you’re away, those fresh originals are automatically copied to the external disk the next time you connect it; the photos are also copied to Creative Cloud in the interim. Most applications, other than Photos for Mac, give you the option of choosing where files from the camera or memory card will be saved. Liberating Images from the Photos for Mac Package It is possible to store photos outside of the Photos library package. Images imported directly from the camera or memory card automatically go to the package, but images imported from the hard disk can stay put in their locations. In Photos > Preferences > General, deselect the Copy Items to the

Photos Library checkbox. Then, instead of importing shots to your

Mac using the Photos app, use the Image Capture app to copy the

files to the directory of your choice. When that’s done, import them

into Photos.

Change Where Lightroom Classic Stores Synced Photos The capability to sync photos between Lightroom Classic and Creative Cloud is something of a bolted-on feature. When you import photos into Lightroom Classic and synchronize them (by putting them in a collection that syncs to the cloud), Lightroom generates a low-resolution version called a smart preview that gets sent to Lightroom Mobile

60

apps on iOS and Android devices (as well as Lightroom CC if you’re using both desktop applications). But what about the images you import into those devices first? They’re automatically synchronized to Lightroom Classic via Creative Cloud, but Adobe chose to put them in a special location, separate from where images that are imported directly into Lightroom Classic are stored: a file called Mobile Downloads.lrdata (on the Mac it’s a package file; under Windows it’s a folder). If you want all your images to use the same folder structure—for instance, you want all photos captured on a single day to appear in the same folder—you need to instruct Lightroom Classic to do so. Open Lightroom Classic’s preferences and click the Lightroom Sync tab. Under Location, enable “Specify location for Lightroom CC ecosystem’s images,” and choose the same directory you use for images you import directly into Classic (Figure 23). Make sure the “Use subfolders formatted by capture date” option is also enabled and set to mirror the same structure that Lightroom uses (year/year-month-day).

Figure 23: Store your synced mobile images with the rest of your Lightroom Classic library images.

When you click OK, the images previously synced to Lightroom Classic won’t be moved automatically, so you’ll need to drag them manually from the Imported Photos folder (within Lightroom) where they reside to the preferred Lightroom location. 61

If you want to be thorough, you can create new folders for every date that’s represented. I settled on a compromise: I dumped all of these into a Mobile Downloads folder for that year (by dragging them within Lightroom, remember). Any new images you sync via Lightroom CC on mobile devices or on the desktop will appear in the location you set.

Make a Backup During Import in Lightroom Classic Another file-related option is to automatically make a backup copy of each image to a separate location during the import process (Figure 24). This feature is good for creating immediate backups while you’re in the field (to a portable hard disk, for instance) or other specific uses. I don’t use this feature for general backups, however; I prefer to stick with a holistic backup system (see Back Up Your Photos).

Figure 24: Lightroom Classic gives you the option to make a second copy of each image during the import process.

Given that this is a book aiming to make photo management easier,

I understand that it sounds like I’m saddling you with a lot of work—

you’re no doubt eager to import your photos quickly and start working

with them! But applying this metadata at the start of the process,

especially by setting up templates to automatically fill in the basics,

reaps benefits later.

62

Judge Your Photos The title of this chapter was originally “Rate Your Photos,” but that just wasn’t the right term. Rating implies something casual, like comparing pears to see which ones are the most ripe. Your photos are more important than that. Instead, you need to be judgmental about your images. That means scrutinizing them with specific quality levels in mind. Sure, it’s easy enough to say one photo is okay and another isn’t so hot, but where does that leave you? With a lot of gray area. And in your mission to take control of your digital photos, you don’t want gray areas. You want to take specific actions to make working with your library better and easier. Judging your photos achieves two goals. It sets up a practical workflow for later, so you know right away which shots you want to share with others and which ones need work in an image editor before being ready to be made public (and which should be deleted or hidden). Judging also helps you become a better photographer, because you look at your shots critically to determine what you’re doing right or wrong, and in what areas you excel or need to improve. In this chapter, I offer a system for judging and flagging your photos to make them most useful in your library. I also discuss how to Cull Bad Photos that don’t make the cut. The Harried Photographer: Rating Photos Even if you’re pressed for time, I recommend rating your photos immediately after importing them. This is the absolute best way to quickly mark those photos you’ll want to use for projects, share with others, and spend time editing later. But you can simplify the rating process to save time. Stick to a binary system: a photo is either acceptable or it’s not. Flag it as a pick or favorite so you don’t need to feel overwhelmed at choosing between one and five stars.

63

Develop a Consistent Rating System Despite my encouragement to be a ruthless editor of your imported photos, this step is usually a lot of fun. You get to study the images you shot and experience the sense memories of capturing them. In Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, and Photoshop Elements, you can assign ratings—typically a scale of zero to five stars—by pressing a number key. In Lightroom, for example, you press 2 for two stars, 3 for three stars, and so on. You can also click rating buttons that appear under the image thumbnail, in an information sidebar or panel, or both (Figure 25).

Figure 25: Rate a selected photo in Lightroom using the mouse.

I prefer using the keyboard to apply ratings, as that allows me to tap a number key and then tap the right arrow key to switch to the next photo. This way I can move quickly through a set without touching the mouse or trackpad. In Photos for Mac, Apple removed the star ratings found in iPhoto and Aperture and replaced them with a simple Favorite button. A photo is either marked a favorite or it isn’t, much like using a flag (see Labels, Flags, and Favorites, just ahead, to stick with that scheme, or see the next sidebar, “Use Star Ratings in Photos for Mac,” for a way to continue to use star ratings in Photos). 64

Use Star Ratings in Photos for Mac The lack of a formal star-rating system in Photos doesn’t mean you can’t rate your images. When Photos converts an iPhoto or Aperture library, existing star ratings are converted to keyword tags, which can be used to filter the images later. If you want to keep using a more nuanced rating system than simple favorites, here’s an easy workaround: 1. In Photos, choose Window > Keyword Manager (or press ⌘-K) to view the Keywords window. 2. If you previously converted an iPhoto or Aperture library, keywords such as 1 Star and 5 Star will already appear. If not, click the Edit button, and define new keyKeywords button, click the Add words named 1 Star, 2 Star, 3 Star, 4 Star, and 5 Star. Click OK. 3. Drag those keywords to the Quick Group field; they should automatically gain shortcuts based on the first letters—which, in this case, are the numbers (Figure 26).

Figure 26: Create custom star ratings using keywords in Photos. Now, you have star ratings that can be applied with keyboard shortcuts. To apply the keywords, the Keywords window must be open. Then, with a photo selected or being viewed, press the number key corresponding to the rating you want to assign.

Tip: Make sure you’re viewing photos large (or full-screen) to get an accurate sense of their quality levels. 65

Before you start assigning stars, make sure you know what each of those stars means for your workflow. Not only do you need to be judgmental while reviewing photos, you also need to be consistent. You can assign any weight you wish to each star level. The suggestions below are my recommendations not only for assigning stars, but also flags and labels (if supported in your program).

Star Ratings Here’s the rating system I use: • One star: A single star is the baseline, meaning the photo is in focus or is not a shot that occurred by accidentally pressing the shutter button. (I’ll address what to do with photos that don’t meet this standard in just a moment.) • Two stars: The photo shows promise and is worth revisiting. Two stars is my “on the fence” rating—it’s better than competent, but doesn’t stand out as much as others. • Three stars: The photo is definitely one I want to keep, and is worth editing to refine its appearance. When I do my initial review pass, I rarely assign more than three stars, but often a three-star image will turn into a four- or five-star image after editing. • Four stars: A four-star photo is in good shape, likely edited somewhat, and is one I’d be happy publishing or sharing online. • Five stars: A five-star photo is one I’d be proud to put in my portfolio or hang on my wall. It’s also a good reference for days when I need inspiration or want to be reminded that I’m not wasting my time with all this camera business. • Reject: Lightroom offers a Reject rating (also available by pressing the X key). Rejected photos are, well, crummy. It happens. Photos for Mac and Photoshop Elements let you hide images that aren’t good instead of rejecting them (press ⌘-L in Photos and Option-F2 in Elements). See Cull Bad Photos for a discussion of what to do with these rejected shots, since there are a few options. 66

You’ll notice I didn’t start with zero stars (unrated)—that was deliberate. As mentioned in Apply Metadata at Import, some photo management applications let you assign a baseline rating to all of your images during the import stage. In Lightroom Classic, I tag every incoming photo with one star during import, because I’m confident that at least most of my shots will meet this minimum qualification. But why not start at zero—the default rating—and build up from there? After all, I’m going to review and assign ratings to every photo anyway. A few reasons: I’d rather reject a few bad images than potentially tap the 1 key dozens or hundreds of times. Also, to my mind, unrated photos are in a photographic limbo—since they’re not rejected and not rated, they’re “undecided.” Tip: I still have thousands of unrated photos in my library from the time before I began assigning one star to every photo on import. But I’m slowly working through the backlog: when I have time to update my archive with ratings, I use a smart album I set up that displays only unrated photos. See Organize Photos into (Smart) Albums.

It also helps me think more critically as I’m evaluating the shots: I’m not deciding whether a given photo is just good enough to include in my library, I’m looking to see if it rises above the others. When I do encounter a shot that’s obviously no good, I mark it as rejected. Self Control Reviewing and rating photos requires a healthy dose of self-control. Believe me, you’ll want to stop rating and start editing. A crop here, some tonal adjustments there…resist that urge! It’s too easy to get lost in editing, taking you away from the review process. Spend too much time editing and the chances that you’ll abandon reviewing the rest of the shots increases. Try to stick to reviewing in one pass, and then you can spend all the time you want on editing later.

67

Labels, Flags, and Favorites Star ratings aren’t the only options for judging photos. In Lightroom Classic you can also apply color labels or a flag—an on-or-off label—to photos. Lightroom CC offers flags, but no color labels. Photos for Mac lets you mark images as favorites. Labels, flags, and favorites act as an extra layer of metadata describing your photos, usually for specific purposes. For example, you may assign a color label to photos belonging to a client or related to a particular job. Or maybe the labels signify steps in your editing process: regardless of rating, you could mark photos you want to edit first in red, less-important photos in orange, etc. Flags work well as labels for short-term actions. For example, I often use flags to mark photos I want to upload to social sites, because it’s easy to quickly display only photos that have been flagged. In Lightroom Classic, choose Library > Filter by Flag > Flagged Only, or click the Flag button next to Filter in the Filmstrip panel (Figure 27).

Figure 27: Displaying only flagged photos in Lightroom.

68

In Lightroom CC, click the Refine Search as Picked button.

button and click the Flag

When I’m done uploading the photos, I remove the flags. In Photos, I tend to reserve favorites for images I want to remember later—not just temporarily—so for short-term actions, like collecting images I want to post online, I add the pictures to a temporary album, like so: 1. Select the photo(s) you want. 2. Drag the photo(s) to an album in the sidebar. Or, choose Images > Add To; pick an existing album or choose New Album and enter a new name. I keep an album called Temp in place just for this purpose. Tip: After you’ve used the menu to add photos to an album, the

application remembers and includes Add to “[Album Name]” to the

menu. Better yet, it has a keyboard shortcut. So you can quickly

select some photos and press ⌘-Control-A to send them there.

When you’re ready to act on those photos, switch to that album. Another way I’ve found labels and flags to be helpful is when reviewing a group of photos with someone else. After a vacation or other photoheavy outing, my wife will often want to choose photos I’ve shot to share with family members. However, no matter how much I respect her opinion (she has a great eye), I don’t want her to change my ratings. Instead, she labels or flags photos she likes. Tip: Lightroom Classic also has a Quick Collection, a permanent

album that you can toss items into just by pressing B or choosing

Photo > Add to Quick Collection. You get the benefit of assembling

a group of photos without worrying about whether they’re flagged

or rated. I sometimes use a Quick Collection when I’m in a hurry

and want to set aside a handful of images to upload to social sites.

69

I want to reiterate that there are no solid rules for rating, labeling, or flagging photos. The software developers put the tools there for you to use as you wish, so you can determine your own rating system.

Cull Bad Photos

After you’ve passed judgment on your photos, you’ll end up with a set that probably includes a lot of one-star images, a few two-star images, and a sprinkling of three-star and four-star shots as well as some rejected or hidden ones. The next question becomes: what to do with those unwanted photos? Some people don’t want to throw out anything, and fortunately the price of hard disks makes that possible. But are you really going to scan through your rejected photos someday to see if perhaps a hidden gem is there? Also, storage isn’t infinite, especially on an SSD. You have three options: do nothing, hide the photos, or delete the photos.

Do Nothing Having rejected or hidden photos in your library won’t hurt anything, and it requires no more work on your part. The downside is that they occupy a lot of storage space on your disk; also, in Lightroom, which doesn’t offer a way to hide images, you’re confronted with them whenever you scroll through your shots. If they weren’t good enough to keep, why let them clutter the library?

Hide the Photos Depending on your software of choice, you can hide the photos from view. If you’ve hidden unwanted shots in Photos or Photoshop Elements, you can make them visible again easily enough: in Photos, select the Hidden album in the sidebar (if you don’t see a Hidden album, choose View > Show Hidden Photo Album); in the Elements Organizer, choose View > Hidden Files > Show All Files.

70

Tip: You can hide rejected photos in Lightroom Classic, but it’s a little cumbersome. Choose Library > Filter by Flag > Flagged and Unflagged Photos. That makes all photos other than rejected photos visible. Then, when you reject a photo, it disappears from view. Lightroom CC offers no option to hide photos.

The advantage to hiding photos is that they’re out of the way, but still around if you believe that nothing should be thrown out (or in case you realize that some blurry outtake is actually a fantastic abstract work of art). The disadvantage is that those hidden photos take up space on your disk.

Delete the Photos If you really don’t want the bad image files stealing your disk space, delete them after you’ve gone through your initial pass. This step is much easier if you used flags or the option to hide bad images on your initial pass. (You could also delete individual photos as you review them, but I think it’s more efficient to stay focused on finishing one task—rating and flagging—before moving to the next.) Each program treats deletions differently. Lightroom Classic: In Lightroom Classic, choose Photo > Delete Rejected Photos (assuming you used the Rejected flag when rating your shots). You’re given the option of removing the images from the library’s catalog (in case you want to hang on to the originals) or deleting the image files from disk; I recommend the latter. Lightroom CC: 1. In the My Photos panel, select an album or the All Photos item. 2. Click the Refine Search 3. Click the Rejected

button.

button.

4. Select the rejected photos you want to remove, or choose Edit > Select All to grab them all. 5. Choose Edit > Delete Photo(s). 71

6. In the dialog that appears, confirm that you want to go through with it by clicking Delete Photo(s). Photos for Mac: 1. Open the Hidden album. 2. Select the hidden photos you want to remove. 3. Hold the ⌘ key and choose Image > Delete [number] Photo(s), or press ⌘-Delete. You can also right-click to bring up the contextual menu and choose Delete [number] Photo(s). The images are moved to the Recently Deleted album. Photos doesn’t eliminate photos right away, giving you a chance to pluck them out of the bin for a month or so (Apple doesn’t specify exactly) after they were deleted. To recover trashed photos, open the Recently Deleted album, select the photo(s) you want to salvage, and click the Recover button. If you want to ensure that the files are deleted immediately, open the Recently Deleted album and select the photos you want to eradicate. Click the Delete [number] Items button, and then click OK in the confirmation dialog that appears. Photoshop Elements: 1. Choose View > Hidden Files > Show Only Hidden Files. 2. Select the hidden files and choose Edit > Delete from Catalog. 3. In the confirmation dialog, mark the Also Delete Selected Item(s) from the Hard Disk checkbox. 4. Click OK.

72

Work Through Old Photos What about the thousands of photos already in your library? Should you draw a line in the sand and consider them untouchable? Since the overall goal is to locate your pictures easily later on, you want to bring the old shots in line, too. As a great side effect, you’ll get to revisit a lot of great memories and find several shots that are better than you remember them. The key to taking control of your old photos is to do it in small, manageable bits. Here are my suggestions: ✦

✦

✦

Don’t try to accomplish everything at once. Give yourself a couple of hours every weekend, say, to sort through those photos. Or, tackle specific time spans such as 3- or 6-month increments. Do rate your photos, but forget about applying detailed keywords; assign them only to large batches. You’re still organizing the library, but in a streamlined, minimal way. That’s especially helpful for when you’re facing a giant backlog of images to process. You can be more thorough later if you feel the urge to add more detailed keywords. Resist the urge to edit. This is tough, because as you revisit photos you’ll want to start making adjustments to them. That’s dangerous when your goal is to process a bunch of photos. Instead, mark photos you specifically want to edit later by placing them in a temporary album marked Edit Later.

The important thing to remember is that the work you put into taking control of your photos pays off down the line—and not just the next time you search for specific shots. Photos are valuable memories, not just files on your computer that, in most cases, could disappear forever and you wouldn’t care. You and future family members will turn to them for years to come to reminisce about good times, laugh (or cringe) at unfortunate fashion choices, and remember loved ones who have passed.

73

Assign Keywords and Other Metadata When my wife and I moved into our house, we repainted most of the interior walls. It was a time-consuming task, but not because of how much wall space needed covering. Splashing color on the wall was the easy part. Taping around windows, preparing the room, and then touching up the edges and corners took much more time. In Import Your Photos the Smart Way I talked about adding metadata during the import process because, to me, that’s the easiest way to apply it. Assigning keywords and other information during that initial stage takes some prep time, but when you click the Import button, the metadata is applied with a broad brush across all your incoming photos. (It’s like handing a paint roller to a capable assistant while you supervise, preferably with a beverage in hand.) After import, though, you have touch-up work to do. To make your photos easily searchable later—the ultimate goal in our organization project—you need to apply more-specific metadata to individual photos. This might include identifying people and landmarks, or describing shots. In this chapter, I look at how to choose good keywords and how to apply them smartly. I also discuss how to fix incorrect dates and times, apply geolocation information, and use facial-recognition tools.

Assign Metadata

Your camera embeds all sorts of metadata, such as the shutter speed, aperture, and focal length, into photos. You’ll rarely search for photos based on those criteria, though. What your photos really need is a sense of context—and only you can provide that.

74

Although you can add descriptive information in several ways—including image titles and captions—I’m focusing on keywords in this section to streamline the process. Writing a title and caption for every image would slow your progress—and increase the chance that you’d abandon the effort altogether—because you end up writing original content for each photo. By focusing on keywords at this stage, you can refine the metadata in batches as you work, so you save time. Think of it as building a pyramid of image information (Figure 28).

Figure 28: Build up metadata in stages for efficiency.

Build up, starting with keywords that apply in general, and then proceed to more specific keywords: 1. During the import stage, assign keywords that apply to every photo in a set, laying down a foundation of metadata. 2. In another pass, assign common keywords to smaller batches of images; for example, maybe all the imported photos were taken at Disneyland, but only a couple dozen are from the Tomorrowland section. You can add a tomorrowland keyword to all those images in one step, versus tagging each shot as you encounter it. 3. Lastly, customize select photos individually by writing titles and captions and applying any additional keywords. I tend to add this level of metadata only to images I rate highly or share online. 75

Choose Good Keywords Keywords add searchable context to your shots—but which keywords should you use? Unfortunately, there’s no universal list of accepted terms. You have to anticipate what you or someone else will be searching for in the future. Generally, that falls into two categories: • Keywords that describe the contents of a photo. For example, the photo in Figure 29 could include boats, seattle, reflection, bay, fog, and shilshole marina (the name of the setting). You may want to add further information such as sunset, clouds, pink sky, dock, and others.

Figure 29: A sunset at Seattle’s Shilshole Bay Marina.

• Keywords that describe the type of photo. That could include landscape (describing both the category and the orientation) in this case. Other images could include nature, macro, people, or black and white (as well as variations such as bw and blackandwhite) that describe those characteristics of the photo independently from its contents. (Since nearly everything is shot in color, I wouldn’t tag something with color; black-and-white is its own photographic category.) 76

Tip: The closest thing to a universal list of keywords is probably the two-part Thesaurus of Graphic Materials published by the U.S. Library of Congress, as noted by Charles Maurer in the TidBITS article Cataloging Photos and Storing Them on the Computer.

Feel free to be generous with your application of keywords. There’s no downside to applying multiple keywords to an image—so long as you have the time—and you can later use that data to pull results from simple text queries. Typing marina in a Search field, for example, narrows the selection of photos to those that contain the word in any metadata field—including keywords (Figure 30). Those keywords also travel with the photo when it’s uploaded to an online service such as Flickr or 500px, so anyone searching for that term will bring up your image.

Figure 30: Searching for the term “marina” in Lightroom.

77

You don’t need to go crazy and describe every last detail, however. For example, here are the keywords assigned to a photo of Apple CEO Tim Cook (and me—yes, I’m showing off) that’s available for licensing by Getty Images (Figure 31): Event, History, Business, Finance, Technology, Horizontal, Waist Up, USA, New, California, Apple Computers, San Jose - California, Merchandise, Digital Tablet, iPad, Corporate Business, Tim Cook Business Executive, iPad Mini

Figure 31: Customers of photo collections such as Getty Images use keywords to locate images.

With a handful of keywords, the photographer (or editor) hit the important terms that customers, in this case primarily news outlets, would be searching for (though I’m a little put out that my name isn’t among them). If professional photo companies don’t need to append an extensive list of keywords to their images, the same applies for anyone’s personal library.

78

Apply Keywords It’s easy enough to add keywords or other metadata to an individual photo: type it into the associated fields in the software’s Info or Metadata pane. But a better approach is to add the data to several photos simultaneously.

Adding Keywords in Lightroom Classic In Lightroom Classic, add metadata in the Library module: 1. Select the photos you wish to edit. 2. Click the Keywording disclosure triangle to reveal the Keyword Tags field. 3. Type the words you want to add in the field labeled “Click here to add keywords,” and then press Return (Figure 32). You can also click any term in the Keyword Suggestions and Keyword Set areas.

Figure 32: Adding keywords to selected images in Lightroom. 79

Apply to Which Selection? If you change any information in the Metadata panel, such as writing a caption, Lightroom puts up an additional confirmation dialog. Lightroom recognizes two simultaneous selections: the group of selected images and a single target image (which is usually the first one you clicked, but you can choose another target while still retaining the group selection). When asked if you want to modify the metadata of all selected images, click the Apply to Selected button.

Adding Keywords in Lightroom CC Keywording in Lightroom CC is pretty basic, but that makes it easier. 1. Select one or more photos in the Grid view. 2. Click the Keywords the K key).

button to open the Keywords panel (or press

3. In the Add Keyword field, type the terms you want, separating each by a comma or by pressing Return (Figure 33).

Figure 33: It’s much faster to write all your keywords in one line, separated by commas.

4. Click the Keywords

button again to close the panel.

80

No Keyword Sync Between Lightroom Applications If you’re using both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC, it’s important to know that keywords don’t sync between them via Creative

Cloud. (If you migrate a Lightroom Classic library to Lightroom CC,

the keywords are imported, although without the hierarchical structure that Classic allows.)

One ugly workaround is to copy and paste keywords into the Caption field in the Info panel. But mostly, for now, we need to just accept the limitation and hope that Adobe better shares keywords between applications in the future for folks (like me) who use both.

Adding Keywords in Photos for Mac In Photos for Mac, you can quickly apply keywords in the Info window: 1. Select the photos you want to edit. 2. Choose Window > Info (⌘-I) to reveal the Info window. 3. In the Add a Keyword field, type the terms you want to add, separating each by a comma or by pressing Return (Figure 34).

Figure 34: Adding keywords in Photos.

81

Tip: To manage your keywords, and assign a keyboard shortcut to a keyword, choose Window > Keyword Manager. You can also apply keywords to selected photos from this window by clicking them. Or, Option-click a keyword to remove it from selected photos.

Adding Keywords in Photoshop Elements Keywording photos in Elements happens in the Elements Organizer application: 1. In the Elements Organizer, select the images you wish to edit. 2. Click the Keyword/Info button at the bottom right to reveal the Tags pane. 3. In the Image Tags area, type keywords in the Add Custom Keywords field, separating the terms with commas (Figure 35).

Figure 35: Adding keywords to a batch of images in the Elements Organizer.

4. Press Return or click the Add button. 5. If you want to edit other metadata, click the Information button and then click Edit IPTC Information (this button appears when multiple images are selected). Enter the data you want in the Edit IPTC Information dialog and then click Save. 82

Fix Incorrect Dates In Shoot Smart, I stressed the importance of making sure your camera’s clock is set to the correct time. If it’s offset—often because the Daylight Saving Time setting wasn’t set properly—you can end up with photos out of order in your library. This inconvenience is common enough that photo management programs include features for dealing with it. Running through the applications, here’s how to wield a little control over time. Lightroom Classic: 1. Select the photos you want to fix. 2. Choose Metadata > Edit Capture Time. 3. In the dialog that appears, choose a method of time-shifting: Adjust to a Specified Date and Time, Shift by Set Number of Hours (Time Zone Adjust), or Change to File Creation Date for Each Image (Figure 36).

Figure 36: Correcting the capture time in Lightroom Classic.

For the first or second option, the shots still retain their relative times. For example, if one photo has a capture time of 10:00 and the next photo was captured 1 minute later at 10:01, changing the first shot’s time to 9:50 would give the second photo the time of 9:51.

83

The third option—changing to the file creation date—reads the original timestamp from the file on disk. 4. In the bottom area, set the time you want. Click Change All. Although the dialog ominously states that “This operation cannot be undone,” that’s not exactly true; it simply means that the Edit > Undo command won’t work. Choose Metadata > Revert Capture Time to Original to go back. Lightroom CC: 1. Select the photos that need changing. 2. Click the Info

button to open the Info panel.

3. Click the Shift Date Range value.

button next to the Captured date

4. In the Shift Date Range dialog, set a new time or date (Figure 37); if multiple photos are selected, they’ll all shift relative to the value you enter.

Figure 37: Shifting the capture time in Lightroom CC.

5. Click Change. Photos for Mac: 1. Select the photos you want to change. 2. Choose Image > Adjust Date and Time. 84

3. In the dialog that appears, make a change in the Adjusted field (Figure 38). If you were shooting in another time zone and want to adjust for that difference, you can use the map at the bottom of the pane to pick the right location.

Figure 38: Changing the time in Photos for Mac.

4. Click Adjust to make the change. Fixing dates in Photoshop Elements: 1. Select the photos you want to change. 2. Choose Edit > Adjust Date and Time of Selected Items. 3. In the dialog that appears, pick a method: Change to a Specified Date and Time; Change to Match File’s Date and Time; Shift to New Starting Date and Time (only if multiple photos are selected); or Shift by Set Number of Hours (Time Zone Adjust). 4. Click OK. 5. In the next dialog (which varies depending on which option you chose), enter a new time, date, or hour adjustment (Figure 39). 85

If you opted to match the file’s date and time, there is no second dialog because the Organizer reads the information from the file on disk.

Figure 39: The Elements Organizer’s two-step dialog dance.

6. Click OK to finish.

Apply Geotags

In Shoot Smart, I discussed capturing geolocation data to keep track of where your photos were taken. If you have a device that writes that information to the photos when they’re shot, such as an iPhone, the data is imported with the images. In most cases, though, you need to record the data separately and then add it to the images later.

Use a Geotagged Reference Photo An easy way to save location data is to shoot a reference photo with a GPS-capable device like a smartphone and then apply the geolocation information to all the photos captured in the same area. You don’t get step-by-step location detail with this method, but in most cases you don’t need that level of granularity. Here’s how to copy location data to your images in each of the programs I’ve discussed.

86

Geotagging in Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic can pull the location data from a reference photo: 1. Select the photos you wish to tag, as well as the reference photo. 2. Click the reference photo to make it the target image; doing so identifies the photo as the source of the GPS data. 3. Click the Sync Metadata button or choose Metadata > Sync Metadata. 4. In the dialog that appears (Figure 40), locate the Camera Info section and select the checkbox for GPS.

Figure 40: Lightroom Classic syncs selected metadata between photos.

87

5. Click the Synchronize button to tag the other selected photos with the GPS data.

Geotagging in Lightroom CC If a photo already has location information embedded in its metadata, Lightroom CC displays it in the Info panel. If not, you can enter the information manually—to a point. It won’t accept specific GPS information, but you can enter a city, state or province, and country. There’s also a Location field that can help refine the spot. Unfortunately, you can’t copy and paste location data between images the way Lightroom Classic can do. 1. Select one or more photos you wish to tag with the same location information. 2. Click the Info

button to open the Info panel.

3. If you know the name of a specific location or landmark, such as a park, enter it in the Location field. By itself, it won’t bring up any results. 4. Enter the City, State/Province, and optionally Country in the appropriate fields (Figure 41). The location shows up on a map that appears at the bottom of the panel. If you put something into the Location field and Lightroom CC recognizes it, the map will give a more specific spot.

88

Figure 41: Lightroom CC can refine a location if it has the name of a geographic feature.

Geotagging in Photos for Mac The location features in Photos are frustratingly limited, even in the updated Photos 3 that ships with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. Photos leans heavily on Apple’s Maps information, enabling you to type the name of a location to pinpoint it, like so: 1. Select one or more photos that contain no location information in the Photos library. (You can also select photos that already have geotagged information if you want to change their locations.) 2. Choose Window > Info to view the Info window. 3. In the Assign a Location field, type the name of the place where the photos were captured and press Return. However, when copying a location from a photo that includes it (such as one shot using an iPhone) to one that does not, the app ignores the 89

specific GPS data in favor of the name that appears in the Info window.

That means a photo I captured on the beach near Fort Bragg, California, for example, shows up as “California, United States” (Figure 42).

Figure 42: The image’s actual location appears on the map, even though it has a general description of “California, United States.”

If I copy that and paste it to an untagged photo, Photos plants a marker in the middle of the state (Figure 43).

Figure 43: When copying location data from a tagged image, the specific coordinates are not included when pasted to an image. 90

The rub is that the specific information is right there in the file; if I open the image in Preview, the coordinates show up. Photos just isn’t bothering to use it.

Geotagging in Photoshop Elements Photoshop Elements doesn’t offer an easy way to copy and paste location data, but it is possible to geotag photos using the Organizer— it’s just a little more work. Here’s how to do it in Photoshop Elements 14 and later: 1. Click the Places button at the top of the screen. 2. Click Pinned to view photos that already contain location information, and find one that is in the same area as the photos you want to tag. Make sure it’s visible in the map. 3. Click the Unpinned button. 4. To the left of the map, select the photos you wish to tag. 5. Drag the selected images onto the photo pinned on the map (Figure 44).

Figure 44: Drag unpinned photos onto a location.

Photoshop Elements versions 11-13 take a slightly different approach: 1. In the Organizer’s Media view, select your reference photo, as well as the images that will share its GPS data. 91

2. Click the Add Places button in the toolbar to bring up the Add Places window. A pin for the reference photo appears on the map. 3. Select the photos you wish to tag, and then drag them to the pin (Figure 45).

Figure 45: Drag photos to a location pin in Photoshop Elements.

4. In the small dialog that appears above the pin, click the Apply button (the checkmark) to place the media at that spot. 5. Click Done.

Merge Tracking Data Reference photos are an easy way to capture GPS data—if you remember to take the shots. Another option is to use a standalone GPS device or an app that tracks location using a smartphone’s GPS circuitry. The advantage with this approach is that you don’t have to remember to take out your phone and record a new photo at each new location—just turn on the device or app at the beginning of your outing, and then apply the data to the imported photos later. Lightroom Classic can import files called tracklogs (recorded location data) in the GPX (GPS Exchange) format generated by devices and apps such as MotionX-GPS and Geotag Photos Pro. Consult the instructions for each to learn how to import the GPX files onto your computer; often it’s a matter of copying files from the device via USB, or emailing them to yourself from the mobile device. 92

Lightroom CC, Photos and Photoshop Elements don’t offer tracklog support, so you need to assign the location information with the help of additional software before importing the images (as I discuss shortly). Tip: Geotagging relies as much on time as it does on location. The software looks at the timestamps of your photos and matches them up with your location at the same time. For that reason, make sure the clocks on your camera and GPS device are synchronized.

Merging Tracking Data in Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic boasts a straightforward method of marrying photos to GPS data: 1. In Lightroom Classic, select the photos you shot during the time you were tracking your location. 2. Switch to the Maps module. 3. Choose Map > Tracklog > Load Tracklog, and locate the GPX file you recorded. An orange trail appears on the map showing the locations that you visited. 4. Choose Map > Tracklog > Auto-Tag Photos. Lightroom Classic positions the photos on the track and saves the GPS data to each image (Figure 46).

93

Figure 46: Photos gain location information from the tracklog

in Lightroom.

Merging Tracking Data on a Mac If you use Photos for Mac, Photoshop Elements, or Lightroom CC, you’ll need a third party utility to apply tracklog coordinates to photos. I recommend HoudahGeo ($39), which reads coordinates, assigns locations, and then exports the data in a variety of ways. HoudahGeo 5 under macOS 10.12 Sierra and later can peek directly into the Photos for Mac library and apply location data to photos that you’ve already imported. For Photoshop Elements or Lightroom CC, you need to copy the image files from the memory card to your hard disk and process them in HoudahGeo before you import them into your chosen library application. You can do that in the Finder, or using the Image Capture application, which you’ll find in the /Applications folder. Then follow these steps: 1. If you use Photos for Mac, open HoudahGeo and select your Photos library to locate the shots you want to work on. If you just imported

94

a batch, expand the Photos item and find Last Import under

Albums.

If you use Photoshop Elements or Lightroom CC, locate the image files where you copied them in the Finder. 2. Drag the images to the main Drag Images Here pane. 3. Click the Import Track Logs button in the toolbar and locate the GPX file containing the location information. The application automatically associates the images with their locations. 4. Click the Process button on the toolbar to view the track and the photo locations on a map (Figure 47).

Figure 47: HoudahGeo associates the tracklog data with the photos’ timestamps.

5. Click the Output button. 6. For Photos for Mac, click the Notify Photos Library button. In the dialog that appears, select the Coordinates checkbox (and others if they apply). Click OK to finish. For Photoshop Elements or Lightroom CC, click the EXIF/XMP Export button.

95

7. In the dialog that appears, select the checkboxes for the data that you want to transfer (such as Coordinates and Altitude). Deselect the Create Copies checkbox (Figure 48).

Figure 48: The EXIF/XMP Export options in HoudahGeo.

8. Click OK. The image files are updated with the location data. 9. For Elements, open the Organizer and choose File > Get Photos and Videos > From Files and Folders (or click the Import button and choose the same item). Navigate to the folder containing the images and import them. button, navigate to the In Lightroom CC, click the Add Photos folder containing the images, and import them. (See Import Your Photos the Smart Way.) The photos are added to your library with the location data applied. 96

Tip: If you’re using Lightroom CC, and you have a Creative Cloud plan that also includes Lightroom Classic, it’s easier to import your photos into their own folder in Lightroom CC, open Classic (which automatically gets those synced files), and add the geotracking data there. The location data is automatically synchronized back to the images in Lightroom CC.

Merging Tracking Data in Windows If you use Photoshop Elements or Lightroom CC under Windows, you’ll need to merge the tracklog coordinates and photos before importing the images. Although it’s an older application, I recommend downloading the free GeoSetter utility and using it to merge the coordinates: 1. Use the Explorer to copy images from the memory card to your hard disk, and launch GeoSetter. 2. In the address bar at the top of the window, navigate to the folder containing your photos. 3. Select the photo thumbnails in the Image Files pane. button in the toolbar, 4. Click the Synchronize with GPS Data Files or choose Images > Synchronize with GPS Data Files. 5. In the dialog that appears, specify the GPX file containing the location information. 6. Click OK. The application automatically associates the images with their locations (Figure 49).

97

Figure 49: Applying location information in GeoSetter.

7. Choose Images > Save Changes of Selected Images. 8. Open the Elements Organizer and choose File > Get Photos and Videos > From Files and Folders (or click the Import button and choose the same item). Navigate to the folder containing the images and import them. button, navigate to Or, in Lightroom CC, click the Add Photos the folder containing the images, and import them. (See Import Your Photos the Smart Way.) The photos are added to your library with the location data applied.

Use Facial Recognition

Facial recognition seems like something out of science fiction, even though it’s been in use for years. The process works the same in most programs: the software detects shapes that are face-like (oval, fleshcolored, with similar areas for eyes, noses, and mouths) and then 98

compares the shapes with other faces already in its library to guess at people’s identities. Modern facial recognition does a surprisingly good job at matching faces and falls into a workflow category that I love: the computer is doing the work.

Identify People in Your Photos In an earlier edition of this book, I advocated disabling facial recognition, since it didn’t provide much more benefit than assigning keywords and tended to make the apps sluggish. Since then, Apple’s implementation in Photos for Mac is vastly better than iPhoto’s or Aperture’s ever was, and Adobe incorporated the feature in Lightroom Classic (but not yet Lightroom CC), making facial recognition a more useful part of the photo management workflow. I wouldn’t say it’s a necessary tool, since it does require some time to set up, but the dividends it pays later when you’re searching for people (especially in older photos that you may not have tagged) are worth it. In each app, the computer finds photos that contain faces and asks you to identify the people. It then recognizes them in other images, making it easy to quickly bring up all photos in which a specific person appears, regardless of where in the library the images are stored. Tip: While the applications will find all faces that appear in your

photos, you don’t need to identify everyone. Name only the people

who appear regularly in your library, and who are important to you.

The purpose of this feature is to locate the faces you care about

finding again.

Facial Recognition in Lightroom Classic The People feature in Lightroom Classic is surprisingly hidden— perhaps to get it out of the way for people who don’t want to use it. Choose View > People, or press the O key, to view the People interface.

99

Note: When you’re initially identifying faces, it takes a considerable amount of time and processing power to examine photos, so I’d advise selecting a subset of your library, instead of All Photographs, to start. Lightroom searches only the photos in the current selection. Or, you could select All Photographs in the Catalog pane and then let the computer churn for many hours or days, depending on the size of your library.

Lightroom finds faces and displays them under the Unnamed People heading. To identify someone, do the following: 1. Select a folder, collection, or subset of your catalog in the sidebar at the left side of the screen. 2. Select a person’s thumbnail and click the “?” label below it. 3. Type the person’s name and press Return (Figure 50).

Figure 50: Identify a person in Lightroom.

Any photos that match the same person’s face are grouped in the Named area. You’ll no doubt find more unnamed pictures of the same person; when you identify them, Lightroom’s recognition improves. Under the Named People heading, double-click a thumbnail to display every confirmed image of the person, followed by a list of suggested matches (Figure 51). Click any thumbnail to select the full photo, or double-click to open the photo.

100

Figure 51: Lightroom is always looking for new faces when you’re in the People interface, including some dubious possibilities here (I haven’t had three eyes for years).

Facial Recognition in Photos for Mac In Photos, people identified by facial recognition are found in the People album (Figure 52). Select People in the sidebar to view faces the application recognizes (in the top portion of the main pane), as well as unknown faces that need your input (at the bottom of the main pane).

Figure 52: People in Photos for Mac appear in a special album.

101

To identify people that Photos has suggested, do this: 1. Position your pointer below a person’s thumbnail, which reveals the Name field. 2. Click the field and type a person’s name. Photos looks in your Contacts database for possible matches; select one and press Return. 3. If the person appears in other images, Photos brings up a dialog asking you to confirm it’s them (Figure 53). Mark the ones that are, and click Done.

Figure 53: Checking for other person matches.

You can also identify that person in other photos later. Double-click a person’s thumbnail to view all the confirmed photos containing them (Figure 54). Double-click one to go to that particular photo. Click the Photos button in the top-right corner to view full photos, or click Faces to view thumbnails containing just the person’s face.

102

Figure 54: Finding my mug in Photos for Mac.

Photos initially shows a subset of all photos; click Show All (located below with slideshow) to reveal all matches. To find other possible matches, scroll to the bottom of the window and click Confirm Additional Photos.

Facial Recognition in Photoshop Elements I must say, I like the way Photoshop Elements 14 and later handles faces in the Organizer compared to earlier versions. To identify people, do the following: 1. Click the People tab. 2. Switch to the UnNamed (sic) pane to see which faces Elements has located. In an attempt to not overwhelm you, only people who appear in several images appear. To see everyone, turn off the Hide Small Stacks option. 3. Select a person’s stack to reveal the photos in which they appear. 4. If any of the images are incorrectly identified, select those to exclude them.

103

5. Click the Add Name label and type the person’s name (Figure 55). Press Return or click the Accept (√) button. That person now appears in the Named pane.

Figure 55: Name a person in Photoshop Elements.

To locate photos containing people you’ve identified, click the People tab and then the Named button. (Figure 56). Click the Photos button that appears when you select a person’s icon to jump directly to the photos in which they appear.

104

Figure 56: The People view in Photoshop Elements 15.

Multiple Matches and the Blue Alert Triangle An alert badge next to a person’s name indicates that Elements has found more potential matches for that face (Figure 57). Click the Faces button below the thumbnail (which appears when you move the pointer over it) to review the selections.

Figure 57: An alert badge means there are additional photos that may include that person. Click the Faces button below the thumbnail (which appears when you move the pointer over it) to review the selections.

105

Organize Photos into (Smart) Albums So much of the information about photography out there focuses (pun intended) on the art and practice of capturing images, but very little addresses what to do with the shots once they’re in captivity. The whole point of taking control of your digital photos is not just to find a place for them on your disk, but to work with them later—whether that’s editing a group of promising images the day they’re shot or assembling a slideshow three years later. This is where the work you’ve done so far pays off. Armed with a photo library chock-full of metadata, you can locate images in a fraction of the time it would take to scan through them visually. I’ll show you how to search for specific metadata—such as keywords and ratings, and even camera-generated data such as aperture, shutter speed, and camera model—to track down shots. Then I’ll cover how to make that search capability work in your favor by building smart albums whose contents can change based on criteria you specify. The Harried Photographer: Organization No time to build smart albums? Stick with scrolling through your library by date or organizing by event (if the software supports it), and create just one or two smart albums, such as one that collects flagged or favorited photos from the past 6 months. Also take advantage of automatic identification features in Photos for Mac, Lightroom CC, Photoshop Elements 15, and Google Photos (see Take Advantage of Software Intelligence).

Locate Your Photos Using Search

When I want to track down photos, I usually start by performing a text search to locate keywords or other data, and then refine the results by 106

specifying star ratings, labels, or flags. Knowing, for instance, that I tagged my Disney vacation photos with keywords, I would do a text search for Disneyland and then filter the results to reveal only images rated three stars or higher. Sometimes I look for specific metadata, such as the camera type or a range of shutter speeds. That enables me to revisit only images shot on my iPhone, for example. Here’s how to take advantage of some of the most useful search features in your photo management software.

Find Text To perform a basic search for text that appears in nearly any metadata field (including keywords, titles, and captions), type a term into the program’s Search field. Lightroom Classic and Photoshop Elements also offer advanced constructions for performing text searches. In Lightroom Classic, you can exclude terms from a search by putting an exclamation point (!) before them. Typing pastry berry brings up all photos tagged with both “pastry” and “berry,” but typing pastry !berry displays photos tagged with “pastry” and hides those that also contain “berry.” To accomplish the same task in the Elements Organizer, you’d type pastry NOT berry. Similarly, add a plus sign (+) before a word in Lightroom Classic to search for text that starts with that word, or append the plus sign after a word to locate text strings that end in those characters. Note: Lightroom CC doesn’t understand advanced syntax the way

Lightroom Classic does, as shown above. In fact, there’s another

gotcha: you must be connected to the internet to perform a text

search in the first place. Adobe has wired the search function to its

Sensei service—which has definite benefits—and doesn’t work at all

without a trip to Adobe’s servers.

You can also control how the terms are handled in Lightroom Classic by choosing from the second pop-up menu in the Text filter bar (see 107

Figure 58). For example, to find photos that contain “pastry” or “berry,” you choose Contains—instead of Contains All—from the menu.

Figure 58: Choose how Lightroom handles search terms. Tip: In Photos for Mac, Lightroom CC, Photoshop Elements, and Google Photos, you can search for categories and other terms that you may not have specifically added, thanks to those applications’ AI search features. See Take Advantage of Software Intelligence.

Search by Rating or Label After I narrow my results using a text search, I next naturally want to see which of those images I’ve rated higher than others. Lightroom Classic includes a rating filter in its filmstrip: click one to five stars to view photos with that rating (Figure 59). Lightroom CC’s rating filter is in the Refine Search options.

108

Figure 59: The Filter control below the photo thumbnails in Lightroom Classic searches based on rating.

The symbol to the left of the stars indicates whether you will view images with the selected rating or higher (≥), with the selected rating or lower (≤), or with just the selected rating (=). You can also click a flag or label to further narrow the number of visible items (Click the word Filter to display these options). Photoshop Elements includes a similar control located just above the thumbnails. Photos doesn’t offer star ratings. If you once used star ratings in iPhoto, you can search for the rating keywords (such as 2 Star), which were created when you converted your library to Photos. Or, open the Favorites album to view photos marked as favorites. Tip: If you’d prefer to move forward using just favorites instead of star ratings in Photos, consider this: Enter 5 Star in the Search field to locate all your best shots, choose Edit > Select All, and then press the period (.) key to mark them all as favorites. Repeat the process for your 4 Star-tagged photos, too.

109

Search by Date Since each program organizes photos based on their capture dates, it’s easy to scroll back through your thumbnails to hit approximate dates. Or, use one of these alternatives to jump to the date you want:

Search by Date in Lightroom Classic For a date search that’s faster than scrolling, expand the Folders pane and dig through the folder hierarchy to find specific years, months, and days.

Search by Date in Lightroom CC Open the My Photos panel and expand the By Date category to drill down through years, months, and individual days.

Search by Date in Photos for Mac Use the navigation buttons at the top-left corner of the Photos window to switch between different library views and zoom out on your photo collection: the Moments view reveals specific days, the Collections view covers a longer span of time, and the Years view presents an overview of several years. The software’s Search field can be helpful with some dates, too. Suppose you want to view all photos shot in October of any year: type October into the field and then browse the results (Figure 60).

Figure 60: Typing a month name brings up photos captured during that month in every year. 110

Search by Date in Photoshop Elements The Elements Organizer includes an interesting variation on scrolling through your photos: a timeline (choose View > Timeline to make it visible) that indicates groups of photos like a bar chart (Figure 61). Click a block to view the photos during that period, or drag the markers at the left and right edges of the Timeline to view only photos within that date range.

Figure 61: The Timeline in the Elements Organizer plots your photos horizontally based on date.

Find Metadata Although it isn’t a common need, you can search for photos based on metadata generated by the camera. For instance, you might want to find vacation photos shot with a specific camera (such as the one your partner used), or want to find all photos shot at ISO 6400 or above so you can apply noise reduction to them.

Find Metadata in Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic provides four panels of metadata from which to choose to narrow your search. Click Metadata in the Filter bar and then choose the metadata setting you want (Figure 62). Clicking a panel’s label reveals the types of metadata you can use.

111

Figure 62: Lightroom Classic’s Metadata filter lists how many photos match each attribute.

Find Metadata in Lightroom CC The metadata that’s exposed in Lightroom CC is limited to filtering by camera model and, if the data is available, location. In the Grid view, click the Refine Search button and choose from one of the pop-up menus under the Search field (Figure 63).

Figure 63: Narrow the number of photos based on the camera used to capture them.

Find Metadata in Photos for Mac Unfortunately, the option to find anything via specific metadata is nonexistent using the Search field. Typing a term brings up matches for data that you supply, such as keywords, titles, and descriptions, but 112

you cannot, for example, reveal all photos captured by a particular camera. This is where smart albums, described just ahead, can be your friend.

Find Metadata in Photoshop Elements In the Elements Organizer, choose Find > By Details (Metadata), specify which type of metadata to use and what information to look for, and then click the Search button. (This is also the route for building a smart album, which I cover next.)

Get Smart about Albums

Performing standalone searches is good when you’re looking for one or two photos, but it’s not as useful when you want to revisit (or create) an entire collection of photos. Most applications have adopted the album metaphor to denote a virtual organizational space. The problem is, albums tend to be dumb containers—you manually update them by dragging items in or out. It’s enough work that I only sporadically use regular albums. Instead, I take advantage of the benefits of smart albums, whose contents change depending on the criteria I specify. For example, I created a smart album that collects all photos tagged with my daughter’s name and captured since her last birthday, and that I’ve rated three stars or higher. As I add more photos—and believe me, I will—they appear automatically in the smart album so I can view and share the best shots of her. You can build smart albums using almost any criteria. Other examples could include a collection of all four-star-and-higher landscapes, photos shot this time last year, or images containing specific people. Note: Lightroom CC currently does not offer smart albums—something I hope changes as the application matures beyond its initial

version.

113

Create Standard Albums for Specific Purposes Although I’m pushing the virtues of smart albums, standard albums also have a place in your library. I use an album named “Temp” to store items on a short-term basis, such as when I’m assembling potential photos for a project and need to go back later and choose some of them. Lightroom Classic offers a handy Quick Collection feature for just this purpose: select one or more photos and press the B key (or choose Photo > Add to Quick Collection). It’s like having a pail for collecting blueberries as you pick them—you’ll empty the pail and reuse it later. What I also don’t like about standard albums, in addition to the manual work involved, is the resulting clutter. You’ll find yourself stepping over a bunch of one-off albums that you may never need to open again. Yes, you can group albums into folders for cleaner organization, but I prefer to minimize the number of albums I create in the first place.

Create Smart Albums As we’ve come to expect, each application implements smart albums in a different way. Here’s a rundown of how to create them, taking into account some of the programs’ special features.

Smart Collections in Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic, which refers to albums as collections, includes a handful of pre-made smart collections such as Five Stars and Past Month. You’ll find them in the Collections pane inside a Smart Collections set. New smart collections can be placed anywhere in the Collections pane, however. As an example, the following steps create a smart collection that displays three-star photos taken within the past 6 months: 1. In the Library module, choose Library > New Smart Collection. Or, click the New Collection (+) button at the top right corner of the Collections pane and choose Create Smart Collection. A new dialog appears. 2. Give the collection a title in the Name field. 114

3. In the Location area, select the checkbox and choose the Smart Collections set from the pull-down menu. 4. Make sure the Match pop-up menu is set to All, which dictates that every condition you set up must be true for a photo to appear. The alternative is to choose Any, which collects photos that match any of the conditions. There’s also a None option if you want to build a search that excludes the criteria you’re defining. Since we want to view images that are marked three stars or higher and were shot in the past six months, stick to All. 5. The first rule is automatically set to [Rating], so click the third dot to the right of the [is greater than or equal to] pop-up menu to define three stars. 6. Click the Add

button to the right of the rule to add a new one.

7. From the pop-up menu at left, change the second rule from [Rating] to [Date] > [Capture Date] (Figure 64).

Figure 64: Defining smart collection criteria in Lightroom Classic.

8. Click the pop-up menu to the right and choose 115

[is in the last].

9. Change the number in the field that appears to 6, and change the next pop-up menu from [days] to [months]. 10. Click Create to save the smart collection. You can add additional rules to further define the smart collection. For example, if you want to exclude photos captured with an iPhone, do the following: 1. Double-click the smart collection in the Collections pane to edit it. 2. Click the Add

button to add a new rule.

3. Change the first pop-up menu to [Camera Info] > [Camera]. 4. From the rule’s pop-up menu, choose iPhone into the field next to it.

[doesn’t contain],

and type

5. Click Save.

The iPhone photos no longer appear in the collection.

Tip: You can also perform regular searches within a smart collection; so you don’t need to edit or rebuild collection settings if you just want to refine the results by a certain keyword or other attribute.

But wait, there’s more! Lightroom Classic supports nested conditions in smart collections. In the collection we just created, all rules needed to be met for an image to appear. But suppose you want to narrow those results to view images tagged with the keywords coffee or pastry? Do the following: 1. Double-click the smart collection to edit it. 2. Hold the Option key and click the Add button, which changes from a plus (+) to a pound sign (#). 3. Leave the first pop-up menu in the new rule set to [Any of the following are true]. 4. From the option pop-up menu, choose [Other Metadata] > [Keywords]. 116

5. Leave the middle pop-up menu set to [contains] and enter your first keyword (in this example, it’s coffee). 6. Click the Add button to create a new rule, which is contained within the nested condition. 7. Set the second nested rule to read: [Keywords] [contains]

pastry.

8. Your smart collection should look like the one in Figure 65. Click Save.

Figure 65: The nested condition tells the smart collection to find images matching the first three rules, but only if they contain the keywords coffee or pastry. Tip: Smart collections look through your entire library for results, but you can narrow the source by specifying a folder or an existing collection. So, if you set up a smart collection but want to be able to display a subset of those images, you’d create a new smart collection with a Source selector that specifies the first collection, followed by the additional criteria.

Smart Albums in Photos for Mac Photos doesn’t expose as much metadata, so its smart albums aren’t capable of the granularity possible in Lightroom Classic. Still, they’re just as capable in most respects. Since Photos doesn’t support star ratings, we’ll set up a smart album that locates photos marked as favorites during the past 6 months. Follow these steps: 1. Choose File > New Smart Album (or press ⌘-Option-N). 2. In the dialog that appears, enter a name for the album.

117

3. The default first criterion is [Photo] [is] [favorite], so leave that alone. 4. Click the plus

icon to add a new rule.

5. Choose [Date Captured] from the second rule’s pop-up menu and specify that it [is in the last] 6 [months]. 6. When the smart album contains more than one rule, the option to match any or all conditions appears; choose All (Figure 66). Notice that the number of results appears in the lower-left corner of the dialog.

Figure 66: View your favorite photos from the past 6 months.

7. Click OK to save the smart album and view its results. Note: Unfortunately, you can’t build smart albums based on categories that Photos automatically generates (described in Take Advantage of Software Intelligence).

If you want to edit a smart album, such as to add another rule excluding iPhone images from the search, do this: 1. Right-click (Control-click) the smart album in the Albums view or the sidebar and choose Edit Smart Album. 2. Click the plus

icon to insert a new rule.

3. In the first pop-up menu of the new rule, choose [Camera Model]. 4. Set the next menu to [is not].

118

5. Choose the camera from the third pop-up menu (Figure 67), and then click OK.

Figure 67: Photos tracks specific camera models. Tip: Although Photos has the option to include a specific album among the criteria, that applies only to standard albums, not other smart albums.

How to Search Using Faux Ratings If you’re using the workaround I shared in Judge Your Photos to continue using faux star ratings, set the first condition to [Keyword] [is] [3 Star] (or whichever rating you want). Unfortunately, you can’t easily specify “3-star and higher” photos, because the filter is looking for just that keyword. In that case, your option is to create separate smart albums for each rating. One partial alternative would be to include the following conditions: [Text] [includes] [Star] [Keyword] [is not] [1 Star] [Keyword] [is not] [2 Star]

That gets you most of the way there, but picks up any photos with “star” in the title or description; in my test that resulted in a few images of starry night skies and images that matched “starbucks.” But if that’s helpful, you can ignore those others.

119

Saved Searches in Photoshop Elements When it comes to smart albums, Photoshop Elements is a special case. You can create a saved search in the Elements Organizer, which queries metadata the same way a smart album does, but you can’t go back and edit it once it’s made. (Adobe even removed the name “smart album” from the application, and stuck with “saved search” instead.) It’s a little odd, and I’ve never figured out why Adobe doesn’t just implement smart albums like other applications do. Still, the functionality is there, but concealed. Here’s how to create our example query to locate photos rated three stars or higher taken in the last 6 months: 1. In the Elements Organizer, choose Find > By Details (Metadata). 2. To ensure the search is looking for ratings and dates, select the radio button labeled “All of the following search criteria [AND].” 3. From the first pop-up menu, choose [Rating]. 4. From the second pop-up menu, choose [is higher than]. Elements does not include an option for “is equal to or greater than.” 5. Set the third pop-up menu, the number of stars, to [2] (Figure 68).

Figure 68: Choosing a star rating in the Elements Organizer. 120

6. Click the Add 7. Choose

button to add another rule to the search.

[Capture Date]

in the first pop-up menu of the new rule.

8. From the second pop-up menu, choose [is within the last]. 9. Set the time to 6

[months].

10. To create a saved search, versus just performing a search, select the Save This Search Criteria as Saved Search checkbox and give it a name (Figure 69).

Figure 69: Save the criteria as a saved search so you can view its results again later.

11. Click Search to view the results. Ideally, at this point I’d tell you how to edit the saved search and add more criteria. But that would be too easy. Since you can’t edit a saved search, instead, do this: 1. Click the pop-up menu that’s part of the Search field and select Saved Searches (Figure 70). The search results appear in the browser.

121

Figure 70: The roundabout method of loading saved searches in Photoshop Elements.

2. Choose the search you saved and click Open. 3. Click the Options menu at the top-right corner of the browser and choose Modify Search Criteria. The Find by Details (Metadata) dialog appears. 4. Click the Add

button in the last rule to add another one.

5. Choose [Camera Make] from the first pop-up menu. 6. Set the next pop-up menu to [Does not contain]. 7. Enter iPhone in the text field. 8. To use this search later, select the Save This Search Criteria as Saved Search checkbox. 9. Enter a new name for the search; you’re actually creating a new saved search with the modified criteria, so choose a different name from what you used before. The Organizer will let you use the same name, but then you end up with two identically titled items in the Saved Searches dialog.

Remove Duplicate Photos

Organizing thousands of files invariably leads to duplicate photos (especially if they’ve migrated between applications and devices over the years). Although duplicates in general aren’t a problem—you should have plenty of storage to handle them—they can be annoying or distracting. 122

Getting rid of pesky dupes turns out to be a little more difficult than you might expect, but utilities exist to make it happen with only a little babysitting on your part.

Remove Duplicates in Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic itself doesn’t offer a method for finding duplicates, but its plugin architecture allows others to create tools that do. I like Teekesselchen for its speed and straightforwardness: 1. Select a collection or All Photographs to scan. 2. Choose Library > Plug-in Extras > Teekesselchen > Find Duplicates. 3. Click Find Duplicates to perform the search (Figure 71).

Figure 71: Search for duplicates in Lightroom using a plugin.

The duplicates it finds are tagged with the keyword Duplicate, marked as Rejected, and added to a new Smart Collection called Duplicates. Nothing is actually deleted from your library, which is good, because you’ll want to go check the plugin’s work. It’s overzealous about what it treats as duplicates. For example, since I often shoot in Raw + JPEG format, it flags the JPEG versions of the pairs as duplicates. 123

You can change the criteria the plugin uses in the Marks and Rules tabs of the Teekesselchen dialog. It also treats photos shot in burst mode as possible duplicates, because the timestamps are so close when you shoot in succession. Lightroom normally doesn’t examine time beyond full seconds, so a bracketed burst (where you’ve set the camera to capture three or more shots at different exposures) can all look like duplicates. To let Teekesselchen recognize sub-second timing, install the separate utility ExifTool and enable that feature in the Rules tab of the Teekesselchen dialog. When you’re confident the duplicates have been found, select them in the Smart Collection and choose Photo > Delete Rejected Photos or Photo > Remove Photos from Catalog. Note: Alas, Lightroom CC does not include a feature for removing

duplicates, nor does it offer an extensible plugin system that would

allow third-party developers to create one. Here’s hoping for the

future.

Remove Duplicates in Photos for Mac The utility PowerPhotos can do a lot with your Photos library, from managing multiple libraries easily to merging existing libraries. One of its tools can find duplicates and assign a keyword or move them to an album so you can delete them later: 1. In PowerPhotos, select your Photos library (which may be the only option if you have just one). 2. Choose Library > Find Duplicates. 3. Click Begin Duplicate Search. 4. PowerPhotos displays results based on the selected Keepers criteria at the bottom of the screen (Figure 72). By default, it keeps the most recently-modified duplicate, but you can also choose which to keep based on other factors in the Keepers pop-up menu.

124

Figure 72: Finding duplicates in PowerPhotos.

5. Under Actions, choose how duplicates are handled: placed into a new album or marked with a keyword. 6. Go through the possible duplicates and pick which versions to mark as keepers and which as “nonkeepers” (Figure 73).

Figure 73: Mark which version to keep in PowerPhotos.

7. Click Apply to process the photos. 125

8. To delete the duplicates in Photos for Mac, go to the Duplicates album or search for the duplicate keyword, and then delete the images. Note: If Photos is set to Optimize Mac Storage for iCloud Photo Library, PowerPhotos can check only locally stored files. You’ll need to switch that to Download Originals to This Mac (or run PowerPhotos on whichever Mac you have that is storing the originals; see iCloud Photo Library).

Remove Duplicates in Photoshop Elements The Elements Organizer takes a slightly different approach to locating duplicates, but it’s a feature that’s built right in. It finds photos that are visually similar, and gives you the opportunity to group them into stacks: 1. In the Media pane of the Organizer, choose Find > By Visual Searches > Duplicate Photos. The application displays similar photos in rows (Figure 74).

Figure 74: Photoshop Elements looks for duplicates and arranges them in stacks for review.

2. Select the photos in each row that are likely duplicates, and click the Stack button. 126

3. Click Done when you’re finished. 4. Choose Find > All Stacks. 5. Double-click a stack to view the first photo in it. 6. Choose Edit > Stack > Expand Photos in Stack. 7. Scroll through the photos to determine which ones to keep and which to discard. You can tag the duplicates in the Information panel, or choose Edit > Delete from Catalog to remove one right away.

127

Go Mobile with Online Photo Services The speed at which photography has gone mobile is stunning. The presence of high-quality cameras in phones has turned millions of people into photographers, whether they realize it or not. Just as significantly, people now expect to access any sort of information on phones and tablets, including photos. That’s a tall order. Photos and videos occupy a vast amount of storage, and the capacities of mobile devices are still relatively small. So, until recently, we’ve had to compromise: if you wanted to access a goodsized portion of your photo library, complete with edited photos and applied metadata, if any, on a mobile device, usually, you had to manually sync them from your computer. Today, several services fill this mobile gap. It’s now possible to carry a representation of your entire photo library in your pocket (with some limitations). This means you can bring up nearly any photo in your library, no matter where you are—or which device took the photo. Notice the qualifiers in that paragraph: possible, representation of, nearly. There’s no way to transport the entirety of an average library at full quality onto a mobile device, so tradeoffs are involved (which I cover in this chapter). Note: Mobile isn’t reserved just for iOS or Android devices. You may want to access your library on a laptop that has limited storage, or on a Mac that lives at a different location, such as an office.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t recommend one service as the single, gold-star solution for mobile photography. Some, like iCloud Photo Library and Lightroom Mobile, are tied to ecosystems, while others, like Google Photos and Mylio, stand on their own. So before we delve into the specifics of each service I’m comfortable recommending, let’s revisit our Take Control goals and apply them to mobile photography. 128

Set Online Photo Goals

Using the guidelines I set forth earlier for choosing software on the desktop, here’s what I think are important criteria for any service that offers mobile photo management: • It must access either your entire photo library, or at least a useful subset of it, without a lot of extra work on your part. • It should let you view important metadata, and even better, allow you to edit the data. • It must let you find photos easily. Just having photos in the cloud doesn’t make them easy to access. • It should take the photos you capture using the mobile device and incorporate them into your main library. I hate that we still need to remember where a photo might be located—the external hard disk at home? The phone? iPad?—instead of having just a single library. We’re getting closer. • If possible, the service should serve as an offline backup of your images. (I talk more about backups in Back Up and Archive.) Like I said, that’s a tall order. And not every service meets all of these goals.

Choose an Online Service

After a lot of consideration, I see online photo services as a parallel option to your main desktop photo library. They’re not as seamless as I’d like, so I think of them as standing just to the side: you’re able to access photos that otherwise wouldn’t be on a mobile or remote device, even if those aren’t the originals. In this section, I break down my top contenders and describe what’s good and not so good about them. They are: iCloud Photo Library (just below), Google Photos, Lightroom Mobile, Mylio (Cloudless Sync), and Amazon Prime Photos. 129

iCloud Photo Library The closest option to a seamless solution is Photos for Mac with iCloud Photo Library enabled. You’re able to view photos on any device, edit them, and see the edits carry along to all devices sharing the same library. You can also view the photos in your iCloud.com account, using the Photos web app.

How iCloud Photo Library Works When you enable iCloud Photo Library, the images in Photos for Mac— as well as on any other devices logged in to the same iCloud account and with iCloud Photo Library turned on—are uploaded to iCloud. To turn on this feature in Photos for Mac: 1. Choose Photos > Preferences > iCloud. 2. Select the iCloud Photo Library checkbox to start the service. 3. If you have a large hard disk, you probably want to select the option to Download Originals to this Mac. If you don’t have much free storage, or if you’re setting up a satellite Mac such as an SSDequipped MacBook, then select Optimize Mac Storage. Important! At least one Mac should have enough storage to act as your main library that will store your originals. I don’t trust any online service enough to consider it the main repository of photos.

To turn on this feature on your iOS devices: 1. Open Settings > Photos & Camera. 2. Tap iCloud Photo Library. 3. Tap Optimize Device Storage. After some time—hours or days, depending on the size of your library and the speed of your internet connection—all of your photos should appear on all your enabled devices. Also, photos you add to those devices in the future, such as images shot using the iPhone’s camera, will be added to iCloud Photo Library automatically. 130

What Are Optimized Images? Optimization is the trick Photos uses to store your entire library on a device with only a fraction of the capacity of the originals. Small, compressed thumbnail images are loaded onto the device so you can browse all your photos. When you tap one to view it, Photos downloads the full-resolution version; a status indicator appears in the lower-right corner of the image (Figure 75).

Figure 75: Tapping an optimized image loads the original from iCloud, indicated by the icon in the corner. Any edits you make are tracked and applied to the copies that exist on all the other devices, even the raw files in Photos for Mac. Photos stores the edits as simple text descriptions, so it doesn’t need to shuttle full edited images around. That also makes it possible to always revert to the original unedited version of a photo. Later, Photos for iOS discards those full-size versions as needed and replaces them with new compressed thumbnails so they don’t overwhelm the device’s storage.

Tip: Photos for Mac updates your library on the fly, but sometimes you may not want synchronization to happen, such as on limited or cellular tethered internet connections. In that case, go to Photos > Preferences > iCloud, and click the Pause for One Day button. 131

Note: Although edits transfer quickly via iCloud and appear on all of the other devices, be aware that some adjustments that are available in Photos for Mac but not Photos for iOS—such as Vignette—can cause confusion. For more details, see my TidBITS article Photos Everywhere with Lightroom CC and Photos for OS X.

Enabling iCloud Photo Library alters some of the ways you interact with Photos. First, you’ll no longer be able to copy photos from your Mac to your iOS devices by syncing via iTunes. Because the photos are transferring via the cloud, Apple removes that option from iTunes. Second, the Camera Roll “album” in Photos for iOS disappears. To view photos that you took on an iOS device, look in All Photos. (If you are also using My Photo Stream, that “album” also disappears and those photos appear in All Photos.)

Metadata and Finding Photos in iCloud Photo Library Unlike on the Mac, in Photos for iOS you can’t view or edit any of the metadata, even though it’s present in the files. Perhaps to compensate for that omission, the search function offers shortcuts, such as bringing up photos near your current location, ones shot a year ago, recent searches you’ve performed, and auto-assigned category searches (Figure 76) (see Take Advantage of Software Intelligence).

Figure 76: Searching in Photos on an iPhone reveals clever shortcuts (left) as well as text matches when you start typing (right). 132

Tradeoffs in iCloud Photo Library If you don’t manage your library using Photos for Mac, you can’t take full advantage of iCloud Photo Library. Since Photos for iOS remains the default app for any images you capture with your iPhone or iPad, you may still find iCloud Photo Library useful as a handy way to access those images (though I’ll soon get into options for importing them into the other apps). If Photos is your ecosystem of choice, be aware that you’ll likely need to buy additional storage. Every Apple ID account gets 5 GB of storage for free, which is also used by other services such as iCloud Drive and iOS device backups. Here are the plans in the United States (Apple also offers international rates): • 50 GB: $0.99 per month • 200 GB: $2.99 per month • 2 TB: $9.99 per month That 2 TB is a hard limit—if your library exceeds it, you can’t store any more images without the oldest ones being removed from iCloud.

Lightroom Mobile Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile is an umbrella term that includes Lightroom CC applications for desktop computers and mobile devices, with some limited interaction with Lightroom Classic thrown in. If you use the new Lightroom CC, you can access your entire photo library on any device, because all your images are stored in the cloud. As you edit, the files are downloaded when needed, and changes are synchronized across all devices. If you use Lightroom Classic, however, the mobile element doesn’t meet most of the expectations I’ve established. For one thing, synchronizing photos between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC for mobile devices is accomplished only at the collection level; there’s no way to include your entire library.

133

However, Lightroom Mobile is the only direct link to Lightroom Classic on the desktop, and since I think that’s currently the best option for managing a photo library, Lightroom Mobile is still compelling. The Costs of Syncing Using Lightroom Mobile with Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic on the desktop requires a Creative Cloud subscription; the most affordable option is the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which costs $9.99 per month and includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC (but read on for details about online storage). It’s possible to install and use the Lightroom for iPad and Lightroom for iPhone apps for free, but on their own they’re limited to editing photos you shoot using the apps or photos from the iOS device’s Camera Roll.

How Lightroom Mobile Works Like iCloud Photo Library, Lightroom Mobile is cloud based: Adobe’s Creative Cloud, in this case. In Lightroom CC, everything you import into the library is uploaded to Creative Cloud and made available to all Lightroom clients. In Lightroom Classic, you mark specific collections (but not smart collections, alas) for synchronization. Those photos are then copied to Adobe’s servers and passed along to the Lightroom CC app on your devices or Lightroom on the web. To add photos to a collection and then mark it to sync: 1. In Lightroom Classic on the Mac, select one or more photos. 2. In the Collections pane, click the New Collection button and choose Create Collection. 3. Give the collection a name, select Include Selected Photos and make sure “Sync with Lightroom mobile” is selected. 4. Click Create. To synchronize an existing collection, click the checkbox that appears to the left of the collection name in the Collections pane. 134

Lightroom Classic uploads the images to Creative Cloud and then copies them to Lightroom Mobile when the app is next opened on the device. As you edit photos in Lightroom Mobile, the changes are synchronized to the desktop and any other devices running Lightroom Mobile. Smart Previews vs. Uploaded Originals When you import images into Lightroom CC on the desktop, the originals themselves are uploaded to Creative Cloud. Lightroom Mobile clients can optionally download an original file when editing a photo, or download a smart preview, which is a version in Adobe’s DNG (Digital Negative) format. A smart preview is much smaller in size, but contains more image information than a JPEG file. Edits made on the mobile device are synced and applied non-destructively to the raw files on the desktop. So, although you’re not working with original-resolution images on mobile devices, the end result is the same. Images imported into Lightroom Classic and synchronized with

Creative Cloud in a collection, on the other hand, are uploaded only

as smart previews. For most practical purposes, you won’t notice a

difference. But if you edit a smart preview outside the Lightroom

Mobile app, you’ll be working on a lower-resolution version.

The Lightroom Mobile apps are particularly helpful for moving new photos from a mobile device to a desktop copy of Lightroom, though. In the app’s settings, you can automatically add new photos you’ve captured or imported onto the phone or tablet to ensure those images are added to your master library. On the Organize screen, tap the Lr button to view app settings, tap General, and enable Auto Add Photos (and optionally Auto Add Videos) from the menu that appears.

Metadata and Finding Photos in Lightroom Mobile Lightroom CC on mobile devices exposes a limited amount of metadata: title, caption, copyright, and keywords. However, keywords transfer only between Lightroom CC on the desktop and the mobile apps; keywords entered into Lightroom Classic do not sync.

135

You can also assign star ratings and flag photos as Picked or Rejected, making the app a good first-pass sorting tool if you’d rather peruse your shots on the couch using a mobile device instead of at a desk in front of your computer. Searching for photos in the mobile apps pulls up that metadata, and is bolstered by Adobe Sensei AI results; a search for winter, for example, reveals any shots you’ve tagged with that keyword, and also those that include snow or other wintery scenes. (See Take Advantage of Software Intelligence.) You can also filter visible photos by tapping the Refine Search button and specifying a star rating or attributes such as Picked or Rejected (Figure 77).

Figure 77: Filter the photos in Lightroom Mobile (iPad shown here).

Tradeoffs in Lightroom Mobile The biggest concern here is that, if you’re using Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mobile isn’t designed to represent your entire library. You also can’t take advantage of keywords, which don’t sync between the two. Lightroom CC, however, overcomes both limitations, but with one catch: depending on the size of your photo library, you’ll need to pay 136

for more Creative Cloud storage. The costs break down like this, depending on which subscription plan you pay for: • Lightroom CC Plan: For $9.99 per month, you get Lightroom CC and 1 TB of storage. • Creative Cloud Photography Plan: Also at $9.99 per month, this plan includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC and 20 GB of cloud storage. Increasing the storage to 1 TB costs $19.99 per month. • Creative Cloud All Apps: The all-everything plan at $49.99 per month gives you all applications and services in the Creative Cloud suite, including Lightroom CC and 100 GB of storage. • Lightroom Mobile: For people who want to use mobile devices exclusively, this $4.99 per month plan enables syncing in Lightroom for iOS and Lightroom for Android. To add more storage to any of the plans, you pay the following in addition to the subscription price: • 2 TB: $20 per month • 5 TB: $50 per month • 10 TB: $100 per month Note: In the TidBITS article Why Lightroom CC Is a Big Step Up from Apple’s Photos, I go into more detail about editing and synchronizing photos using Lightroom Mobile.

Mylio (Cloudless Sync) Mylio runs on nearly everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Android), makes metadata available and editable on mobile devices, and has a novel method of synchronizing photos among devices. There are a few quibbles that keep me from using it more intently (which I discuss earlier in the Mylio section on choosing a photo management application), but in terms of mobility it has a lot to offer. 137

How Mylio Works What’s especially cool about Mylio is how it synchronizes photos between devices: it doesn’t shuttle everything through a cloud server. Instead, devices work peer-to-peer; as long as your phone, tablet, and computer are all on the same Wi-Fi network, they update each other directly. (You can also choose to use Amazon or Google Drive as a form of cloud storage if you’d like, for storing favorites or shuttling images between devices that are not available for peer-to-peer sharing.) Tip: Due to the way Apple has designed Photos for Mac, Mylio cannot work with a Photos library. It can only copy and convert a library to Mylio’s format.

Metadata and Finding Photos in Mylio After resigning myself to the reality that no online service wants to bother with metadata, Mylio was a surprise. Titles, descriptions, keywords, ratings, and color labels are editable (Figure 78). Not exposed is IPTC metadata, but that information is included in the image file (if it’s a JPEG) or in the XMP file that travels with the original raw file; clicking the Metadata option in the Info panel opens a page in your web browser that breaks out all of the metadata.

Figure 78: Mylio’s Details pane, right, exposes plenty of metadata.

138

In terms of searching for photos, the Search field finds text matches. Or, if you tap the Search icon, you have the option of filtering the results by ratings, flags, keywords, identified people, or locations (Figure 79).

Figure 79: Search and filter options are available in Mylio.

Mylio also includes a Calendar view for searching by date that isn’t just an endless scroll back through time, which is welcome.

Tradeoffs in Mylio Mylio offers support for Lightroom Classic, plus raw image editing and a few other features, but they require a paid Mylio subscription that ranges from $100 to $250 per year; you can try them using the service’s free 30-day trial. There’s also a free tier that limits what the software can do. However, using Mylio with a Lightroom Classic library can be ridiculously complicated. To make sure any edits are applied in both places, you need to remember to save the changes with each photo you work on. If you already use and pay for Lightroom Classic, adding Mylio on top of that isn’t worth the hassle. If you use Lightroom CC, you already 139

have a way to update all your devices. On the other hand, if you do not use Lightroom, Mylio is a more attractive option.

Google Photos Google’s online photo service is quite impressive. It takes advantage of Google’s scale in the service of helping people track and enjoy their photos. (Yes, I just used the word “enjoy” in the context of Google without irony.) However, it’s a service that works alongside, not directly with, your regular photo management application. If your main goal is simply to have access to all of your photos anywhere you go, this is a powerful option.

How Google Photos Works Google has an enormous amount of distributed processing power at its disposal, which the Google Photos service uses to organize and analyze the photos you upload. The images are then available via the web at photos.google.com or on your mobile devices running the Google Photos app. To use Google Photos on the Mac: 1. Install the Google Photos Backup app. 2. When the Google Photos Backup dialog appears, specify which folders it should watch. You also select the file size of the images you want to upload; I discuss that in more detail in a moment. Tip: Google Photos Backup includes an option to back up the Photos for Mac library. However, once uploaded, the images are no longer associated with Photos for Mac, so any edits you make in Photos for Mac are not reflected in Google Photos (and vice-versa). I suggest that if Photos for Mac is your main photo management tool, use iCloud Photo Library instead.

When new images are added to the watched folder, they’re automatically uploaded to Google Photos in the background. The uploader can also scan and upload photos directly from attached cameras and memory cards. 140

On iOS devices, the Google Photos app can be set to back up and sync the contents of your Photos library, so any new photos you take are uploaded to Google. Images and videos you’ve added to the Google Photos library are also available for viewing within the app.

Metadata and Finding Photos in Google Photos The Google Photos approach to metadata is interesting. Google assumes (probably correctly) that people don’t want to spend time applying keywords, so it ignores them entirely—even in photos that have keywords written to the image file. The only way to add any information not contained in the EXIF data created by the camera is to include the information in a Description field. Instead, Google Photos identifies noteworthy things about each photo. Click the Search field and feel free to choose any search terms you’d like, versus trying to remember how you keyworded a batch of photos. (See Take Advantage of Software Intelligence.)

141

The Truly Helpful Google Photos Assistant All that Google Photos distributed processing power isn’t reserved just for identifying items in photos. The service includes an Assistant feature that processes your photos in interesting ways and creates versions that would take you a lot of time to make (Figure 80).

Figure 80: The Assistant has created movies and other fun creations from my photos. For example, it will occasionally apply a stylized effect to a photo, or collect a day’s worth of photos and build a story that acts like a guided slideshow. If you shot a series of images in rapid succession on burst mode, it builds an animation out of them. It can detect when you’ve captured a set of bracketed photos (multiple shots of the same scene with different exposures to record all the light and dark values) and automatically create an HDR (high dynamic range) version. It will even combine video clips shot on the same day and create a short edited video, complete with background music. And, one of my favorite features, the Assistant offers a Rediscover This Day feature that presents photos taken years ago on that date. None of these adjustments are made to the original photos, and it’s your choice whether to add them to your library.

142

Tradeoffs in Google Photos I like Google Photos, but using it does involve several tradeoffs when viewed in the context of our desire to take control of digital photos. Not only can you not add your own keywords, but you also can’t rate images or choose favorites. One workaround is to create an album for favorites and add selected photos to it. There’s no good integration with your master photo library. You can point Google Photos at the folder in which your Lightroom originals reside, for example, but the two don’t synchronize. Edits you make in Lightroom aren’t reflected in Google Photos, and vice-versa. So, you end up with a separate copy of your library. That’s not terrible, but it veers away from the cohesiveness of a central place to store all your photos. Google Photos offers two storage options: free and paid. The free level lets you store an unlimited number of photos, but the images are stored as compressed JPEGs. The quality of those versions is high, but it excludes raw files from your online library and, at the deepest level, you’re working with photos that have had data removed. The other option is to pay for storage, which allows you to upload original files, including raw files. A free Google account includes 15 GB of storage that covers all Google services (like Gmail or Google Drive). For more than that, you pay: • 100 GB: $1.99 per month • 1 TB: $9.99 per month • 2 TB: $19.99 per month • 10 TB: $99.99 per month • 20 TB: $199.99 per month • 30 TB: $299.99 per month Then there is the Google Question. The company makes a lot of money by collecting data about everything and everyone it can, and parlaying that into targeted advertising. Google representatives have stated that 143

Google Photos is not collecting personal information for advertising or sales purposes, and will not use any photos for its own use. And for now, I believe them. But the company could change that policy. I maintain an active Google Photos account, because I like many of the Assistant features and it’s clear that the Google teams involved with the service are genuinely attempting to revolutionize the way we store and interact with digital photos. But it stands to the side of my master library. If some catastrophe befell my library (and its backups, and backups of backups), I’d have the Google Photos images—the compressed JPEGs—as a last resort fallback. Flickr Is Nice, Too Yahoo’s Flickr revived itself a few years ago and is now pursuing a similar strategy to Google Photos. Every free account gets 1 TB of storage (although with ads occasionally interspersed among the pictures), which can be filled using an uploader application on the Mac or allowing the Flickr iOS app to automatically add photos from the Camera Roll. The photos it uploads are kept private, and are not published for public viewing without your permission. Flickr also has a Magic View feature, which identifies objects and

scenes and categorizes them to make it easier to find shots.

There’s also a Pro account that removes the ads for $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year; the latter also offers savings when purchasing Flickr merchandise and a discount on Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan for the first year.

Amazon Prime Photos Amazon’s entry in the photo-storage game was initially heavy on storage with little else. Amazon runs an extremely profitable side business providing virtual hosting and data processing, so a photo service was a natural fit. However, it was basically just a giant box in the cloud. In 2016, though, Amazon released a revamped Amazon Prime Photos that matches most of the features of Google Photos. Your photos can be uploaded from the Mac via the Amazon Drive application or the Prime Photos app on iOS devices. One notable differentiator is the 144

Family Vault, which enables up to six people to share an account. Storage is unlimited for the Amazon Prime subscriber, and each family member gets 5 GB of private storage.

How Amazon Prime Photos Works On mobile devices, download the Prime Photos app, which uploads images from the photo libraries stored on each device, much like Google Photos does. On the Mac, the service uses the Amazon Drive application, which creates a folder in the Finder into which you can copy just about anything. Image files found there appear in the Prime Photos mobile app or on the web at amazon.com/photos/.

Metadata and Finding Photos in Amazon Prime Photos Amazon’s expanded image analysis capability means that you can search for not only people, locations, and dates, but also “things” based on objects that Amazon’s algorithms detect within your photos. Those are listed to the left of your library at the Prime Photos website for easy access (Figure 81). You can also use the Search field to look up those terms and other metadata, too.

Figure 81: View recently uploaded images at Amazon Prime Photos.

145

Tradeoffs in Amazon Prime Photos The biggest annoyance with Prime Photos is that, on the Mac, uploading photos is a manual operation. The Amazon Drive application doesn’t offer the capability to watch folders or grab images from your Photos or Lightroom libraries, which makes it more of a hassle. You also won’t find a way to rate or favorite images, other than to add them to albums. The good news is that photo storage is unlimited, and the service recognizes many (but not all) raw image file formats; my FujiFilm .RAF files can be uploaded, but won’t display as photos. Oh, and as indicated by the name, you need an Amazon Prime subscription to take advantage of the service.

146

Back Up and Archive An old printed photo is often precious because it’s the only copy that exists. You may be able to make a new print from a negative, but what if the negative is no longer available? If the prints and negatives are accidentally thrown away or damaged, that particular image is gone. In the digital age, that type of scarcity isn’t as much of a problem. You can easily make hundreds of digital copies of a photo, transmit it around the world with a click, or send the image file to a drugstore and have inexpensive prints made. And yet, digital photos suffer from a different type of scarcity: no matter how easily they can be reproduced, bits are fragile in a way that paper or film isn’t. One drive failure can wipe out your photos—all of your photos—in an instant. If the read/write head of a drive starts chopping into the physical surface of the disk, or the bits on a solid state drive (SSD) get scrambled—or worse—those photos are toast. The solution is to ensure you have a solid backup system in place—not just for your photos, but for all your important data. You want multiple copies that you can access easily and reliably. You also want to make sure you can read the image files in the future. Unfortunately, as I discuss at the end of the chapter, that isn’t an easy guarantee given the change in software and hardware over the years. Data Rescue If something happens to your disk before you could make a backup, there may be one final line of rescue. Data-recovery companies such as DriveSavers can open the drive and read data that may otherwise be lost. There’s no guarantee, and it’s expensive, but if the only alternative is to lose your photos forever, it’s worth it. DriveSavers even employs trained crisis counselors who can talk you through the initial shock. (I wrote about my own experience with a potentially fatal hard disk crash way back in 1999 in TidBITS: DriveSavers to the Rescue. I’ve employed paranoid backup systems ever since.)

147

Back Up Your Photos

As a photographer, you probably view your photo files as special collections of bits, but the truth is your computer sees them as just more data. That’s why it’s important that you have a system in place that backs up all your data, including photos. I can’t cover all the ramifications of a good backup scheme here, but if you use a Mac, you’re in luck: Joe Kissell has already done that work. I highly recommend his ebook Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac (and not just because I’ve been fortunate enough to edit several iterations of the title). If you use Windows, the advice below applies just as well. Joe goes into much more detail, but here are the components of a solid backup system that you should be working with today: • A versioned backup: This backup scheme doesn’t just make a copy of your data, it also stores several past versions so you can go back and recover one saved earlier than the most recent version (for example, if you need a paragraph in a document from last week that you accidentally overwrote yesterday). The Time Machine feature in macOS is a versioned backup; it scans your computer every hour and makes a copy of files that have changed since the last time it ran. Another example is Dropbox, which stores a copy each time you save a file in your Dropbox folder. • A bootable duplicate: If your hard drive decides to head for the great spinning platter in the sky, how long will it take for you to get back to work? A bootable duplicate is a mirror of your hard disk you can swap in if the original fails. You can also make a bootable duplicate of an SSD startup drive. • An offsite backup: A dozen backups won’t mean anything if they’re all stacked near your computer when a fire or other disaster strikes. So in addition to having a versioned backup to quickly access files and a bootable duplicate to run the computer, make sure you have a copy of your data that resides somewhere besides where you normally use the computer. That could be an online backup

148

such as Backblaze, or a duplicate drive you take to an office or the house of a trusted friend (or both). But even if you already have this three-pronged backup system in place (how responsible of you!), I recommend maintaining at least two backup copies of just your photo library. Yes, these are above and beyond normal backups. Why? First, because photos are the most precious data on my disk—and something I can’t recreate—I want to make sure I have a separate copy of my library. Most of the other data on my hard disk either runs the computer or is devoted to business or other files that can be replaced. Second, photos occupy a lot of storage space. All my business and personal files fit into a comparatively small portion of my drive that gets backed up to Dropbox. But my photo library runs well over 1 terabyte, which is too large to effectively store remotely. (It’s not impossible, but since my house isn’t connected to an internet backbone, the transfer times are lengthy.) So, by nature of size alone, digital photos demand different treatment. So why two copies? It’s important to have two so you can rotate them: take Duplicate_1 off-site and use Duplicate_2 for backups for a couple of weeks (or every month, depending on how often you update your photo library), and then take Duplicate_2 off-site and use Duplicate_1 as the active backup. Note: Think of these offsite backups as different, separate copies

from an online backup, such as Flickr or Google Photos. I detail the

differences in Go Mobile with Online Photo Services.

The photo management software you use will help dictate the best way to back up your library. If your library exists on an external hard disk, it’s easy to create a discrete backup by duplicating that disk; Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, Photos, and Photoshop Elements all support storing photos on an external disk. Let’s look at how to back up the two important components of your photos: the image files themselves and their metadata. Since the meta149

data is tracked by the applications, the programs include features for backing up their catalog databases. Hard Disks: the Current Preferred Backup Medium Over the years, many types of storage media have plugged into our computers, but right now the most versatile one is the common hard disk. It has two overwhelming advantages: it offers huge amounts of storage and it’s inexpensive. At this writing, you can buy a 2 TB drive for around $80. Hard disks are also relatively speedy for accessing data; SSDs are much faster but also much more expensive. Granted, I’m suggesting you purchase at least two external drives just for photo backups, which starts to add up in cost. You can save money by purchasing a “hard-disk toaster” such as the NewerTech Voyager, a dock that slots an internal 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA hard disk vertically like a piece of toast. Unlike standalone external drives, bare disks don’t require their own connectors and power supplies. You avoid a mess of tangled wires and power bricks, and the disks are much more portable. But they’re more vulnerable too— make sure to protect them in transit!

Back Up Image Files If your photo library resides on an external drive connected to your computer, the easiest way to make a backup is to duplicate the disk’s contents. I use SuperDuper ($27.95), which makes a perfect copy of my media disk to a backup disk (Figure 82); another popular option is Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.99). Under Windows, look to Macrium Reflect Home Edition ($69.95) or Paragon Backup & Recovery Free (free). These utilities offer a “smart backup” feature that copies only new files in subsequent backup passes, saving a lot of time spent transferring data. They also support scheduled backups to automate the process.

150

Figure 82: SuperDuper is set up to copy my external disk to a

backup hard disk.

What if your computer includes a capacious hard disk and your photo library is stored there along with all your other data? Your photos will be backed up along with the rest of your data (because you’ve read Joe’s book and implemented a system-wide backup system, right?). To create an additional backup of your photos, use a synchronization application such as ChronoSync ($49.99) to sync just the photo folder or library file. (By default, all the photo management applications I cover store images in the Pictures folder located in your Home folder, but you can change that location.)

Back Up Metadata Of course, all the work you’ve done so far in this book would fly out the window if you lose the metadata you’ve assigned to those photos. Lightroom Classic and Photoshop Elements include a way to back up the database that ties all the metadata and images together.

151

Lightroom Classic Lightroom Classic asks to back up the catalog when you quit the application. To change the frequency of when you’re prompted to back up, do the following: 1. Choose Lightroom > Catalog Settings. 2. Click the General tab if it’s not already active. 3. Under Backup, choose an option from the “Back up catalog” pop-up menu. I have it set to “Once a day, when exiting Lightroom,” but you can choose a more- or less-frequent time period (Figure 83). To access your backup settings and change the location of the backup file, choose “When Lightroom next exits;” that ensures the Back Up Catalog window appears the next time you exit the program.

Figure 83: Choose when Lightroom backs up its catalog file.

4. Close the Catalog Settings window.

152

If you want to change the location of the backup file, do this: 1. Quit Lightroom. 2. In the Back Up Catalog dialog that appears, click the Choose button associated with Backup Folder (Figure 84).

Figure 84: With these settings, Lightroom backs up its catalog once a day when you quit the application.

3. Specify a location and click Choose. 4. Click “Back up” to back up the catalog.

Photoshop Elements The Elements Organizer in Photoshop Elements includes a Backup Catalog feature as well as a regular reminder to use it. When the Organizer makes a backup, it includes everything—files and metadata. Here’s how to get started: 1. Choose File > Backup Catalog. 2. In the Backup Catalog to Hard Drive window that appears, choose Full Backup. (You must perform a full backup before you can make incremental ones.) Click Next. 3. Choose a destination drive, and optionally change the name or specific folder location of the backup (Figure 85). I recommend that you create a new folder for the destination, because of the way Elements handles incremental backups (just ahead). 153

Figure 85: Specify a location for the catalog backup in the Elements Organizer.

4. Click Save Backup.

The files and catalog data are saved.

The process of updating an existing backup is strangely kludgy:

1. Choose File > Backup Catalog.

2. In the window, choose Incremental Backup and then click Next.

3. Select the destination drive from the list provided.

4. For the Backup Path setting, click Browse and in the dialog that appears, create a new folder that’s separate from the original folder you made when performing the full backup. I suggest naming it something with an incremented number, like CarlsonBackup02. The Organizer stores incremental files in separate folders—which you have to create. 5. Click the Browse button next to Previous Backup File and locate the backup file you created earlier; it’s called backup.tly. 154

However, if you’ve already made an incremental backup, you need to choose the backup.tly file either in the original backup folder or in the previous incremental backup folder you created! So if this is the fifth time you’ve made an incremental backup, you need to choose the backup.tly file located in (to use my example) the CarlsonBackup04 folder. Madness. 6. Click the Save Backup button.

Lightroom CC and Photos for Mac Since Lightroom CC and Photos store everything together in one package file, make sure that the file is getting backed up in your larger backup scheme, and synchronized to an external disk.

Online Backups Earlier I mentioned online backup options such as Dropbox and Backblaze, but of course those aren’t the only options for photographs. Flickr, 500px, SmugMug, Google Photos, Amazon Prime Photos, and other photo-sharing sites let you upload photos for others to see. They seem like ideal solutions for storing off-site backups—they’re designed for photos! However, I don’t recommend them as genuine backup services. Not long ago, I’d have argued that limited storage space was the primary restriction, but the big players now offer unlimited or very generous storage. Flickr, for example, offers 1 terabyte of photo storage for members, even those who sign up for free accounts. (If you had a Flickr Pro membership prior to May 20, 2013, you may still have unlimited storage grandfathered in.) Both SmugMug and 500px offer unlimited uploads for paid accounts. Now, the problem is transferring all that data in a reasonable timeframe. Making a true backup of your photo library can require weeks of upload time (and potential trouble with your internet service provider, who may see your massive outflow of data as suspicious). Also, although the sites do a fair job of extracting metadata such as keywords from the uploaded images, they don’t support ratings. And 155

the sites generally support only JPEG files, leaving raw originals out of the backup. (See Go Mobile with Online Photo Services for more details.) That said, I do believe that you should subscribe to at least one photosharing site, even at the free level, and think of it as the if-everythingelse-burned-up-in-a-fire disaster alternative. Upload your favorite photos so others can view them (or choose who gets to access the shots using the site’s privacy features) and use it as an offsite backup for a limited collection of your library.

Archive Photos for the Future

When we think about keeping photos safe, we also need to look to the future. How will we view our photos in 5, 15, or 50 years? Our grandparents’ prints survive in our closets because they were printed on paper that, in general, has held up pretty well over the decades. Digital technology, however, is a different case entirely. Did you ever store your photos on floppy disks, or maybe Zip disks? Today, you can’t read either medium without old drives or adapters to bridge the connectors used then—such as SCSI and parallel ports—with what ships now—like USB and Thunderbolt connectors. Hard disks are the best mechanisms for storing your active library, and they turn out to be, for now at least, the best choice for archiving. Keep in mind that when I say “best,” I’m really saying, “the least painful option,” because hard disks are occasionally unreliable. In addition to wear and tear affecting their delicate components, they’re not ideally suited for long-term storage: they stick if not spun up occasionally. This means you can’t reliably store your library on a hard disk and put it on the shelf indefinitely. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray optical discs all suffer from having comparatively little available storage and from plastic surfaces that degrade over time. Even discs that claim long lifespans haven’t been around long enough for us to know whether they’ll last 30–50 years, at which point drives that can read them likely won’t exist. 156

So, at least until someone cracks this storage nut, you’ll want to implement a rolling backup strategy. Transfer photos from older, smallercapacity hard disks to newer, larger-capacity hard disks as technology improves and as you need more storage. And be sure to maintain redundant backups to ensure you don’t lose images on the way. The rolling backup strategy applies to software, too. Even if you use Lightroom for years, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to read a library created with a much older version of the software. So it’s also important to keep your backups up to date with your software’s current library format. As I’ve reiterated throughout this book, the photos’ metadata is almost as important as the image files themselves. Ideally, your photo management software—which tracks that metadata—will continue to be updated and improved, but as history has shown, that isn’t always the case. If you’re truly concerned about the possibility of losing metadata, Lightroom Classic offers an additional safeguard: write the metadata to the original image files. If Lightroom were to disappear or suddenly stop working forever, the essential information—mainly keywords and IPTC information—will transfer to whatever new software you use. That way, you’re not entirely dependent upon the application’s database for tracking metadata. To marry your images and metadata, choose Lightroom > Catalog Settings, click the Metadata pane, and select the checkbox for Automatically Write Changes into XMP. The information is included in JPEG images and saved as XMP sidecar files for raw images. XMP sidecars are small text files that contain a photos’ metadata and are saved alongside the image files. Many applications, when importing images, will read the XMP file along with the image file and display the information together. (You can also save metadata to image files manually by selecting one or more photos and then choosing Metadata > Save Metadata to File, or pressing ⌘-S. This feature is most helpful when you’re sharing

157

photos with someone else who’s using Adobe Bridge or other software that recognizes XMP files.) Admittedly, this is a step above normal operating procedure, since it essentially gives you a fallback position in case Lightroom were to suddenly vanish—which is very unlikely. But for the best approach going forward with Lightroom Classic, it’s a solid plan. Note: The march of digital progress doesn’t just leave average users like us in the lurch. Animation powerhouse Pixar nearly lost the entire movie Toy Story 2 during production when an accidental command began destroying live files, and the company’s backups turned out to be corrupted. Luckily, a single computer containing nearly all of the movie was at an employee’s house while she was on maternity leave.

I don’t want to end this chapter on a sour note, so I’ll reiterate the most important point: you need a system in place that backs up all of your data, not just the photos—and does it regularly. And, because I’m paranoid, having an extra backup (or three) of your photo library is a great idea, too.

158

Migrate to Lightroom Classic CC If you’ve used a Mac for a while, your photo library may be in iPhoto or Aperture—both of which have been discontinued by Apple. The easiest path to bring your photos into the present is to upgrade to Photos for Mac, but as I’ve discussed elsewhere, I prefer Lightroom for many reasons. (For a discussion of the migration process to Photos, read Jason Snell’s Photos: A Take Control Crash Course.) Moving to Lightroom Classic isn’t a straightforward process, however. Granted, if you want to move from iPhoto or Aperture (but not Photos), it’s easier now that Adobe includes a migration tool in Lightroom Classic—as a direct response to Apple tossing aside iPhoto and Aperture—but there are still details you need to be aware of. (Believe me, it’s now far easier than the process of moving from iPhoto to Lightroom Classic just a couple of years ago; if you own the first edition of this book, you know what I’m talking about.) Likewise, moving from Photos to Lightroom has some quirks, and you may not love the results, but it is possible. What about moving to Photoshop Elements? Although the Elements Organizer is more capable in many ways, it’s not a significant improvement over iPhoto or Photos (in fact, its inflexible smart-album replacement—saved searches—are a downgrade). If you’re going to put the work into moving your iPhoto library, do it to a significantly better application such as Lightroom Classic. Jumping from iPhoto or Photos to Lightroom CC also requires some thought. There’s no direct way to migrate into Lightroom CC, so the better approach is to follow the instructions in this chapter to migrate first to Lightroom Classic, and then migrate that library to Lightroom CC. (I detail the process in Take Control of Lightroom CC.) If you don’t want to do that, check out the instructions in Moving from Photos to Lightroom at the end of this chapter. 159

If you’ve decided that you’re ready to move to Lightroom Classic, this chapter will guide you. I first look at migrating from iPhoto or Aperture (just ahead) and then at Moving from Photos to Lightroom Classic. Warning! I highly recommend—no, I strenuously insist—that you

have at least one backup (preferably two!) of your photo library

before attempting anything in this chapter. If anything should go

sideways, you can open the old library and be back where you

started, safe and sound.

Moving from iPhoto or Aperture to Lightroom Classic Migrating your libraries to Lightroom Classic is a multi-step process, even with Adobe’s iPhoto and Aperture import tools. I recommend trying the steps below on a small iPhoto or Aperture library for an initial run-through, so you’re familiar with the process. It boils down to the following: 1. Create a new Lightroom Classic catalog. 2. Repair the iPhoto or Aperture library. 3. Import the iPhoto or Aperture library. 4. Add the imported photos to your main catalog. If you’re just switching to Lightroom Classic and don’t have an existing Lightroom Classic catalog, skip step 4. I include it because I suspect that photographers kick the tires on new software by importing selected photos to see how it works. Tip: Be sure to browse Adobe’s Aperture Import plug-in for Lightroom FAQ.

160

Step 1: Create a New Lightroom Classic Catalog If you already have a Lightroom Classic catalog, this step isn’t technically required—you can import an iPhoto or Aperture library into an existing Lightroom Classic catalog. However, I’m more comfortable doing the import into an empty vessel and doing any cleanup there than dumping the images into my main catalog, where it would be more difficult to extricate any images that didn’t import well. 1. In Lightroom Classic, choose File > New Catalog. 2. Choose a location for the catalog on your disk and give it a name; click Create. Lightroom Classic first closes your open catalog and then creates the new, blank one.

Step 2: Repair the iPhoto or Aperture Library To sanitize the incoming data as much as possible, I recommend running a couple of basic repairs on the iPhoto or Aperture library before you import it into Lightroom: 1. Hold the ⌘ and Option keys while opening iPhoto or Aperture to bring up the Photo Library First Aid dialog (Figure 86).

161

Figure 86: The Photo Library First Aid tool in iPhoto and Aperture will help clean up the library’s database.

2. Select Repair Database and click Repair. 3. When the repair is finished, quit the program. Keep an Eye on the Numbers This is a useful step, but it’s not a surefire cleaning pass for an iPhoto or Aperture library. I say this because I ran into at least one library in my testing in which iPhoto reported one number of photos, but Lightroom Classic imported thousands more. It turned out that many photo masters were present within the library’s package file, and no amount of repairing or rebuilding made them show up within iPhoto or Aperture. So, if for some reason you end up with far more images than you expect, the best advice I can give is to shake your fist in the direction of Cupertino and be happy you’re leaving iPhoto behind.

162

Step 3: Import the iPhoto or Aperture Library Now that your library is prepped, it’s time to use Lightroom Classic’s tool to import the images: 1. Choose File > Plug-in Extras > Import from iPhoto (or Aperture) Library. Tip: If you are starting from an empty Lightroom catalog in Lightroom CC 2015.0 or earlier, it needs at least one image to be present before you can import photos from iPhoto or Aperture. Click the Import button and locate one photo on your disk to import it.

2. In the dialog that appears, click the Select button that corresponds to iPhoto Library and select the library you’re importing photos from (Figure 87).

Figure 87: The Import from iPhoto tool is more functional than beautiful.

3. Choose a destination by clicking the Select button for the Copy Images/Videos To option. 4. Click the Options button to change the import options (see the next sidebar, Import Photo Library Options). 5. Click the Import button to begin. 6. When the process is complete (which could take a long time, depending on the size of the imported library), you’re alerted to any problems, such as referenced originals that are missing. Select 163

the option labeled “Write summary to LibraryImport.txt in the Documents folder.” The file that’s created can be used to track down any shots that weren’t imported. Import Photo Library Options Lightroom Classic handles the conversion from iPhoto or Aperture, with some options you should be aware of. Here are my recommendations: ✦

✦

✦

✦

✦

Previews from iPhoto/Aperture: Enable this option to make sure you get an edited version of the photos you’ve edited in iPhoto. This option does result in multiple copies of those photos— the original and the adjusted version—because Lightroom Classic doesn’t apply adjustments in the same way as iPhoto and Aperture. Keywords from iPhoto/Aperture: With this option enabled (the default), only keywords used by the images in the library are brought to Lightroom Classic. Turning it off pulls all keywords, whether they apply or not. Keep it on. Files Referenced in iPhoto/Aperture: Importing images from an iPhoto or Aperture catalog copies them from their original location to a new one. With this option enabled, any photos that live outside the iPhoto or Aperture library package are left in place. If you end up returning to iPhoto or Aperture for some reason, those images are then used by those apps in addition to Lightroom Classic, causing potential conflicts. Referenced Files Stacking: When you enable previews in the first option above, a new checkbox appears in the Files Referenced section: “For referenced images left in their original location, place version previews in the same folder as the master image to allow for automatic stacking.” Keep this turned on, so you’re not looking at all the duplicates. Map to keywords: This additional option appears when you import an Aperture library. It creates keywords for color labels and stacks, which are not handled the same in Lightroom and Aperture. Keep these options turned on.

164

Ratings, keywords, and other data remain intact in the imported photos. Here are a few things to be aware of: • Edited photos appear in a stack (a bound collection of images) with their originals (Figure 88). The number at the top-left corner tells you how many images make up the stack.

Figure 88: Adjusted images are grouped with their originals in stacks.

• Those edited photos also gain descriptive text in their filenames, based on titles you gave them in iPhoto or Aperture; for example, the adjusted image in the following figure is named Macaron Sign_i‐ Photo_preview.jpg. • The previews, however, do not gain any of the metadata, such as keywords, that were applied to their originals. • Lightroom Classic creates a new collection set (which is like a folder) for your imported images, called From iPhoto (or From Aperture). Inside you’ll find collections containing just the edited photos, hidden photos, and the most recent import. This is also where events or projects are organized, again in collection sets, to replicate the organization structure of the previous software. • People identified using the Faces feature in iPhoto or Aperture are tagged with keywords matching the people’s names. They aren’t automatically recognized by Lightroom Classic’s People feature, 165

although the application will scan the images to find faces when you go to the People view. • Smart albums, alas, do not transfer over as smart collections. • Other casualties are iPhoto-specific creations such as slideshows, books, calendars, and cards. You can save those as movies (in the case of slideshows) or PDF files (for the other items). Or, if you have the storage capacity, keep the old iPhoto library as a backup that you can open for the near future.

Step 4: Add the Imported Photos to Your Main Catalog The last step is to combine the Lightroom Classic catalog you created for the imported photos with your main Lightroom Classic catalog: 1. Open your main catalog in Lightroom Classic. 2. Choose File > Import from Another Catalog. 3. Locate the catalog file containing the images you imported from iPhoto or Aperture (the filename ends in .lcat). Click Choose. 4. In the Import dialog that appears, all the images are selected for import; if you want to review and not include some of them, deselect folders in the Catalog Contents pane (Figure 89). Select the Show Preview box to view the photos themselves.

166

Figure 89: Import iPhoto or Aperture photos from the Lightroom Classic library you created into your main Lightroom Classic library.

5. In the File Handling pop-up menu, choose where you want the image files to end up: in their existing locations or to a directory of your choice. 6. Click Import to bring the photos into your library. Now your photos are in Lightroom Classic. Congratulations on escaping from iPhoto or Aperture.

Moving from Photos to Lightroom Classic What if you’ve upgraded an iPhoto or Aperture library to Photos for Mac, but decided you want to move to Lightroom Classic after all? That path is currently somewhat rocky. Lightroom Classic’s import tools won’t open a Photos for Mac library (at this writing), which means a workaround is necessary. And when I say “workaround,” I mean an ugly hack. Here’s the issue: You can export images from Photos, but only as JPEG (or TIFF or 167

PNG) files, and you lose the ability to revert back to the original versions of images you’ve edited. Or, you can export the originals, but you lose any adjustments you’ve made. In either case, you lose the Favorite flag. However, the task isn’t impossible. It involves creating a couple of smart albums and exporting their contents, and then bringing the image files into Lightroom Classic. I suggest trying the steps below on a subset of your images in Photos for an initial run-through, so you know what to expect before you convert your entire library. Here’s a method for migrating your Photos library to Lightroom Classic: 1. To preserve any favorites that you’ve marked in Photos, open the Favorites album. 2. Select all the images in the album, open the Info window, and add the keyword favorite. Note: If you need a refresher on how to assign keywords, see Adding Keywords in Photos for Mac. For help making a smart album, flip back to Smart Albums in Photos for Mac.

3. Select all images in your Photos library and export the original versions to a new folder (choose File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals for X Photos). Make sure the Export IPTC as XMP checkbox is enabled to preserve your descriptions and keywords. 4. Create a new smart album that finds [photo] [is] [edited]. Export the results as JPEGs (choose File > Export > Export X Photos) to a different folder than the one containing the originals. Make sure the checkboxes for including title, keywords, descriptions, and location information are marked (they are by default). 5. In Lightroom Classic, choose File > Import Photos and Video and import the photos from the two folders.

168

The edited versions appear alongside their originals with metadata intact…except for favorites, that is. 6. To bring back your favorites, in Lightroom Classic’s Library module, do a text search for favorite, select all the results, and then apply a flag by choosing Photo > Set Flag > Flagged (or press P); or, mark the photos with a rating or color label to set them apart. I’ll admit that this isn’t a pretty solution, and you will likely have to do some cleanup, but it gets you most of the way there. I’m hoping that in time we’ll see an updated migration tool from Adobe, or better access to Photos for developers, that will streamline the process.

169

About This Book Thank you for purchasing this Take Control book. We hope you find it both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments.

Ebook Extras

You can access extras related to this ebook on the web. Once you’re on the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy a subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.) • Read the ebook’s blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview. • Find out if we have any update plans for the ebook. If you bought this ebook from the Take Control website, it has been automatically added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually: • If you already have a Take Control account, log in to your account, and then click the “access extras…” link above. • If you don’t have a Take Control account, first make one by following the directions that appear when you click the “access extras…” link above. Then, once you are logged in to your new account, add your ebook by clicking the “access extras…” link a second time. Note: If you try these directions and find that your device is incompatible with the Take Control website, contact us.

170

About the Author

Author and photographer Jeff Carlson (@jeffcarlson on Twitter and Instagram, [email protected]) is a columnist for the Seattle Times and a contributing editor at TidBITS, plus he writes for publications such as Macworld and DPReview. He is the author of Take Control of Lightroom CC and Apple Watch: A Take Control Crash Course, among many other books. He believes there’s never enough coffee and does his best to test that theory.

Acknowledgments I’ve had the great pleasure of being involved with Take Control since its inception, and I can’t overstress my appreciation for Adam and Tonya Engst as the original publishers of this work, and as editors and friends. I’m thrilled that when the idea of this book first came up, I was their choice to write it. Many thanks go to Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke, the new Take Control publishers, for their encouragement, patience, and steady hands directing this wonderful publishing house. Kelly Turner was invaluable as editor on this project, not only because she accommodated my schedule (we both endured many late nights, made more extreme sometimes by being on opposite time zones in the United States), but because she’s amazing with words. I also want to thank the many readers who initially wrote to Take Control asking us to cover this topic and have purchased the first two editions. Special thanks go out to the TidBITS members who followed 171

along and provided feedback as we published the first edition of the book in chapter form on a weekly basis. And no project is complete without the support of my wife, Kimberly, and my daughter, Ellie, who endure this late-night writer’s schedule and frequent requests to jump in front of the camera.

Shameless Plug I produce a lot of creative material—something which I’m honored to be able to do—including photographs, books for Take Control and Peachpit Press, and articles for Macworld, the Seattle Times, iMore, DPReview, and other outlets. Find my work at jeffcarlson.com and sign up for my low-volume newsletter to learn about new projects and occasional deals and giveaways. Thank you!

About the Publisher

alt concepts inc., publisher of Take Control Books, is operated by Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke, who acquired the ebook series from TidBITS Publishing Inc. in May 2017. Joe brings his decades of experience as author of more than 60 books on tech topics (including many popular Take Control titles) to his role as Publisher. Morgen’s professional background is in development work for nonprofit organizations, and she employs those skills as Director of Marketing and Publicity. Joe and Morgen live in San Diego with their two children and their cat.

Credits • Publisher: Joe Kissell • Editor: Kelly Turner • Cover design: Sam Schick of Neversink • Logo design: Geoff Allen of FUN is OK

172

More Take Control Books This is but one of many Take Control titles! Many of our books focus on Apple products, but we also cover general technology topics. You can buy Take Control books from the Take Control online catalog as well as from venues such as Amazon and the iBooks Store. Our ebooks are available in three DRM-free formats: PDF, EPUB, and the Kindle’s Mobipocket.

173

Copyright and Fine Print Take Control of Your Digital Photos ISBN: 978-1-947282-21-6

Copyright © 2018, Jeff Carlson. All rights reserved.

alt concepts inc. 4142 Adams Ave. #103-619, San Diego CA 92116, USA Why Take Control? We designed Take Control electronic books to help readers regain a measure of control in an oftentimes out-of-control universe. With Take Control, we also work to streamline the publication process so that information about quickly changing technical topics can be published while it’s still relevant and accurate. Our books are DRM-free: This ebook doesn’t use digital rights management in any way because DRM makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of this ebook with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, they should buy a copy. Your support makes it possible for future Take Control ebooks to hit the internet long before you’d find the same information in a printed book. Plus, if you buy the ebook, you’re entitled to any free updates that become available. Remember the trees! You have our permission to make a single print copy of this ebook for personal use, if you must. Please reference this page if a print service refuses to print the ebook for copyright reasons. Caveat lector: Although the author and alt concepts inc. have made a reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this book is distributed “As Is,” without warranty of any kind. Neither alt concepts inc. nor the author shall be liable to any person or entity for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation lost revenues or lost profits, that may result (or that are alleged to result) from the use of these materials. In other words, use this information at your own risk. It’s just a name: Many of the designations in this ebook used to distinguish products and services are claimed as trademarks or service marks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features that appear in this title are assumed to be the property of their respective owners. All product names and services are used in an editorial fashion only, with no intention of infringement. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is meant to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this title. We aren’t Apple: This title is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Because of the nature of this title, it uses terms that are registered trademarks or service marks of Apple Inc. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can view a complete list of Apple Inc.’s registered trademarks and service marks.

174