Dear friend,

My name is Anders and I’m the CEO of Brattoo Propaganda Software. Christmas is coming up, and with that hopefully a lot of great photo opportunities. For over a decade we, at Brattoo Propaganda Software, have helped people all over the world to clean up their photo libraries, getting rid of those duplicates. Now, libraries are getting bigger and bigger and it is time to take it to the next step; organizing. We all do this or at least we try to, but in some cases it is simply too overwhelming. Creating books and albums, writing captions, assigning keywords, and sorting can be really tedious. Let’s talk about this.

What Photos can do for you

Photos is a great way to collect all your photos in one place and with iCloud you also get the possibility to backup, share and sync your photos fairly easy. Photos can help you tag people, show location based on metadata and since Photos version 2 you can even search for objects in your photos. The only problem is that we really don’t know what Photos has tagged our photos with, and that makes it hard to understand how it works and how to use it. We have thought a lot about this and came up with a solution: Photos Tagger.

Photos Tagger – unleash the inner secrets of Photos

Photos Tagger is a brand new application that we have developed and it grabs all that hidden data about your images from deep within the Photos databases and assigns it to your photos as keywords. Now all that data is available to you to work with when organizing your photos. So what kind of data is this? First we have data based on date such as month and year, then we have GPS based data such as a nearby attraction, street, city and country. Then we have all the people that have been detected in your photos. And finally we have all the items that Photos has detected such as car, tree, grass, buildings and so on. And all those keywords are in your language so in my case I get all the extracted keywords in Swedish.

So, why do we want this? Keywords are easy to add and delete from one or many photos in Photos. Keywords are synced between your devices, if you have your library in more than one place. Keywords are terrific when creating smart albums. Let’s say that I want an album with all photos of my kids, from our trip to Disney Land in Paris in 2015, to share with my parent-in-laws but not any of the other photos from the same trip. With keywords it is super easy and only few clicks away. It can be done within minutes.

I personally believe that keywords really are the key to start organizing and bring order to large albums.

You can download and try Photos Tagger from here http://brattoo.com/#photostagger.

I would love to hear your thoughts about Photos Tagger.

Smart Albums – how they work and why you want them

I know, I wrote about smart albums in a previous newsletter (https://newsletter.brattoo.com/?SoDU5#letter) but it’s worth to mention again, especially since Photos Tagger has enabled some new possibilities. So here is my updated chapter about Smart Albums.

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 another popup will appear (just above the conditions) asking if all conditions have to be met or just one 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. With the help of Photos Tagger you can easily search for both locations and items in the photos. Don’t forget, 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.

A quick hint about keywords

When you have the Keyword Manager open in Photos (Window->Keyword Manager or Command+K) you can assign keywords using Quick Group keys which are key shortcuts to selected keywords. One of our readers, David Jenkins, has found an undocumented feature in Photos and that is that if you add the option key the Quick Group keys can be accessed and used even when the Keyword manager window is not open. Thank you David for sharing with us!

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. I have been thinking about adding screenshots to my emails. What do you think I should do? 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