Dear friend,

My name is Anders and I’m the CEO of Brattoo Propaganda Software. In my last email I focused on the various methods of exporting images from Photos and how it works depending on various aspects. I also introduced our online version of this newsletter and our new section with free apps. We received a lot of cheerful feedback, including an unexpected positive listing by the Australian Consumers Association, for which I am very grateful. Many readers have been inspired by our free apps section and we have received requests that we are working on. I will tell you more about those projects in future emails. In this newsletter I will focus on Search and Smart Albums in Photos which we get a lot of questions about. I hope you will enjoy it.

Search – find your photos like a pro without any effort

In Photos you can search for almost anything, and that is done from the search field located in the upper right corner of the Photos application. You can access the search field in three ways. Either click on it, use the key combination Command+F or use the menu item Edit->Find. If you use Photos prior to version 2 then the search field will be quite limited. Whereas if you use Photos version 2, you will have access to a lot of neat stuff.

Start searching by typing a word or location, a drop down menu will appear below the search field as you type. Each item in the drop down menu consists of four things: a thumbnail image, a matching text string (where the actual match is marked with bold text), a match type and a number. The matching text string is simple to understand, it is simply the text that is matched based on what you have searched for. The number shows how many photos matched the search item. You can navigate through the items in the list by using the mouse or the arrow keys. If you use the arrow keys then you can select one item by hitting the return key.

The match type, which is shown just under the matching string, is the clever thing. It shows what kind of data is matched by your search. The most obvious match type is Filename. Title, Description and Keyword might also be reasonably easy to figure out and understand. The Title, Description and Keyword are the fields that you can fill out in the Info Window in Photos which I mentioned in a previous email.

Photos know stuff about your photos that you might not be aware of! It uses the GPS coordinates stored in your images to find Places, Street, City, County and Country and thereby make it possible to search for locations. Pretty cool! In the same way it uses the dates of the photos, you can search for specific dates as well. And you can combine those so you can search for something like Paris 2015, and it will find the photos taken in Paris in 2015!

If you have used the People feature in Photos and named the detected faces then those are also searchable. Photos added to Albums or Memories can also be located by searching for the Album or Memory name.

Now for the final thing, Photos uses artificial intelligence and tries to identify the contents of your photos. So what does this mean? It means that it will identify and make your photos searchable by their contents like car, toy, beverage and so on. Exactly what the photos are marked with can’t be seen within Photos but it is accessible when searching. This means that you can search for Car Sweden April 2016 and Photos will find the photos you took of cars in April 2016 in Sweden.

Those of you who use Siri on your iPad, iPhone or in macOS can also ask Siri to search for specific images like, “Show me photos from Sweden”.

Albums

Before telling you about Smart Albums, I need to tell you about the basics of Albums. A common misconception is that Albums are folders. They are not. You put files in folders and when you do so the file is in your folder. When you put a photo in an Album it is shown in that Album but it is not relocated there. This means that you can have the same photo in multiple Albums without duplicating it. This also means that if you delete a photo from an Album it will not be deleted from your Library. Well, that is not quite true. You can delete a photo from an Album and at the same time delete it from the Library by using the key combination Command+Backspace.

Smart Albums – how they work and why you want them

You might have used regular Albums before when organizing your photos. A Smart Album will also help you sort and bring order to your photos but in a more automatic way. A Smart Album is an Album that populates itself based on the search conditions of the Smart Album. The changes are done live, so if you add or remove photos to/from your Library then the Smart Albums will reflect those changes. This can be extremely useful when categorizing your photos.

Create a Smart Album either by clicking on the ⊞-icon in the upper right part of the Photos application or by using the key combination Option+Command+N or by using the menu item File->New Smart Album. When you create it, you will be presented with a dialog box where you set the name of the Smart Album and add conditions that have to be met for photos to be added to the album. Next to each condition is a ⊕-icon which you click on if you want to add more conditions. If you have more than one condition, then yet another popup will appear just above the conditions asking if all conditions have to be met or just any of them.

There are plenty of conditions, so play around with them and explore. Unfortunately, many of the things that you can do with the search field (like searching for location or items in the photos) can’t be done with Smart Albums, at least not yet. However, there are a great deal of things that you can locate with Smart Albums that you can’t with the search field.

Since Smart Albums are live and automatically populated with photos, you can’t remove photos from them and at the same time keep them in the Library. However, you can delete them from both the Smart Album and from the Library by using the key combination Command+Backspace.

Do you use Smart Albums? Then please let me know how you use them.

Folders

As I mentioned above, Folders are not the same thing as Albums. You might have noticed that there aren’t only Albums and Smart Albums in Photos. There are also Folders. Folders in Photos is not the same as folders in the Finder. Folders in Photos are used to group Albums, both regular Albums and Smart Albums. So if you have many Albums, you might want to consider using Folders to bring some additional structure to your photos.

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

A personal thank you

It is great fun to write those newsletters and to hear from you, both good and bad. However, living in Sweden and not speaking english natively writing those emails would be very hard without help from our fantastic Editor Joy Woodruff. Thank you Joy. Joy is also fantastic entrepreneur who developed and design compression garments mainly for cancer patients going through a tough surgery/recovery. Please check out her work here http://www.comfortandjoyinc.com/

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

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