Hi,

My name is Anders and I'm the CEO of Brattoo Propaganda Software. It has been a very hectic month, but now I’m back with yet another newsletter. In my last letter I wrote about Photo Stream and what you can do with it. This time I’ll look into something that I get a lot of questions about, Family Sharing in Photos and what that is all about. I hope that you will enjoy it.

Photos Tagger – more features in the pipeline

Recently we added the option to grab events from your calendar and assign them as a keyword to your photos, which can be a really useful addition when trying to bring order to your photos and make them easy to find. I also told you about David from the Netherlands, who asked for the option to assign Holiday keywords based on the location where the photos were taken. We are still working on optimizing this feature and expect to release it soon. Peter in New Zealand made us aware that New Zealand specific holidays are missing in Photos Tagger. With the help of Peter we learned about the holidays of New Zealand and we expect to implement them soon into Photos Tagger. Did we miss any other specific holidays, or other features in Photos Tagger? If so, please let us know. Meanwhile, you can enjoy all the current features of Photos Tagger version 2.3.0. Please download it from here https://brattoo.com/#photostagger.

Duplicate Annihilator – more fine tuning!

In my last letter I asked for bug reports. These reports are essential for us, we can’t test every possible combination of setups when it comes to hardware, software and versions in our labs. We have received a few reports, both on found bugs and also on things that can be made smoother. This has resulted in a small version bump to 3.1.2 where we have trimmed performance as well as removed minor bugs. Please continue to help us improve our software by letting us know if you run into trouble. Duplicate Annihilator for Photos v3.1.2 can be downloaded from here https://brattoo.com/#photos.

Photos Family Sharing

Sharing photos with family members is a problem many of us have encountered. There are many aspects to it when you start investigating, I’ll try to cover some of those aspects here. Let’s start looking into the basics. Your Photos library is located in your account on your computer. If you and your husband/wife/partner/kids have their own devices and accounts then you have different Photos Libraries. But what if you want to share those libraries?

Use the same library

Some just give up and import all their devices to the same account. Then the Photos Library of one family member is the master library, where the family photos are kept. Pros are that all photos (hopefully) are in the same place, cons are that the photos aren’t really easily accessible for everyone.

Use the same library on a shared network volume

Some put the library on a network volume or clouded drive, like OneDrive or Dropbox. Don’t do this. I won’t get into the technical details, but it is a great way to get the Photo library database out of sync and quite possibly corrupted or damaged.

 

Use the same iCloud account on all accounts

If you use an iCloud Photos Library, and use the same iCloud accounts on all accounts and devices, then the photos will most likely work. Unfortunately you will soon run into other problems related to sharing the same iCloud account, like having the same notes, calendars etc. It might work for some, but for most it will probably cause other headaches.

Do you really want the same library?

Once our mind is set to have the same Photos Library for all family members, you might start to wonder if we really wanted this? Once upon a time, we had family photos kept in a box and it was the natural thing to keep them all in the same place. But today? We use the camera in our smart phones for so much more than just holiday pictures. In the store looking for Christmas gifts we might take a few shots just to remember them. Do we really want those photos to show up on the devices of our family members? Taking a few shots of the presentation at the business meeting, do we want those photos in the family album? We use the camera in new ways so perhaps it is time to find a different solution for our photos?

Shared albums

In Photos we have shared albums, you can use it to share photos with family and friends. If you have enabled Family Sharing on your iCloud account, you and your family members will automatically have a shared album named Family in Photos. You can share photos and movies using those shared albums. Drag the photos on your Mac, or assign them to the shared albums on your iPhone. Everyone who has access to the shared albums can then import the shared photo to their libraries, or comment and like the photos. Sounds great huh?

Shared albums – the dark side

You guessed it, it is too good to be true. Even though it is easy to share photos in albums it can’t be done automatically, neither the sharing part nor the downloading part. So, if you want to share photos with your family you have to drag the photos there yourself. Your family will have to download them themselves to their libraries. Not very automatic. There are other limitations as well. You can only share 5000 photos in each shared album, so just one Family album will most likely not be sufficient. You can however share up to 200 albums, but it gets cluttered, don’t you think?

 

Ok, so you are fine with those limits and manually keep the shared album clutter free. Then you decide to upload the family trip photos. Then, all of a sudden you might encounter the next limit, you can’t upload more than 1000 photos/hour to a shared library or 10,000 photos per day.

 

Fine with those limits? OK, now we encounter the next thing. Images and movies will be resized and recompressed in the shared album. This is of course to save space but the ironic part about this is that the recompression is done really poorly so that the smaller photo in the shared album might actually have a bigger file size than the original. This is especially true if you shoot photos in the HEIC format (which I described in a previous newsletter) since HEIC is converted to JPEG when assigned to a shared album. This also means that if you upload a photo to a shared album, and then download it again to the same library, it will not be recognised as a duplicate by Photos. Luckily enough, Duplicate Annihilator for Photos will recognize them as duplicates, and make sure that you keep the one with the highest quality.

So even if shared albums are great for easy sharing of fun photos and happy times with family and friends, don’t expect them to get the same quality photos as you have in your library. I believe that I will have to get back to this in a future newsletter.

How have you and your family solved this? Please let me know by replying to this email.

This newsletter and previous letters

Several of our readers have requested that we resend previous emails so that they could catch up on earlier tips and information. All previous emails are available online in our Newsletter section at https://newsletter.brattoo.com

The free apps section

As I have mentioned in previous letters we have received requests on how to automate some tasks in Apple Photos or tasks related to photos. Those tasks might be tedious to work out manually but are easy for us to solve. The apps include a tool to set the Photos Titles based on filename (with or without file extension), a tool to copy and apply GPS coordinates between photos and finally a utility to set the correct file dates on image files based on the photo date stored in the metadata within the image files. You’ll find all our free apps at https://free.brattoo.com.

Upgrades

Finally I would just like to tell you that our upgrade discount for Duplicate Annihilator for Photos is still available. For only $4.95 you can upgrade any old Duplicate Annihilator license to Duplicate Annihilator for Photos and for just one dollar ($1.00) more you can upgrade any old Duplicate Annihilator license to the Duplicate Annihilator Toolbox including a family pack! This means that you get five licenses for you and your family for all versions of Duplicate Annihilator including iPhoto, Aperture, iOS and Photos for only $5.95.

Get the upgrade from: https://upgrade.brattoo.com

Thank you for your time, I hope that you found this email informative. If you have any feedback, suggestions, questions or ideas then please reply to this email. I read all emails and reply to them in person.

Best Regards,
Anders, CEO and Founder, Brattoo Propaganda Software