Phones and digital cameras took all the process and ritual out of photography. No more inserting film. No more waiting to see if, once again, your latest Snappy Snaps delivery of prints was a bunch of duds. However, most of us tend to take all of our photos with a phone, and leave them quietly mounting like miscellaneous junk shoved under a bed. The pillows may be close to touching the ceiling.
Actively curating and organising your digital photos sounds like a chore. But much like physically writing a diary, or even just a to-do list, it helps cement the memories they hold. That might be handy in 2021, when the days of holidays can seem remote.
This kind of curation is less of a pain in the backside than you might imagine. We’re going to look through the tools Apple Photos and Google Photos offer for curation, at how to pick your best photos, and a few ways you can quickly make the best ones look better. Now, it’s advisable to do this on a laptop or iPad, particularly if you’ll be dealing with years’ worth of images.
Android phone users should take particular note. Google Photos currently offers unlimited storage of photos for free (at somewhat reduced quality). That changes in June 2021, after which you’ll have to pay for cloud storage beyond the first 15GB.
How to organise in Apple Photos
Apple added automatic curation of your iPhone photos in 2019. This lets the Apple Photos app filter your images in a bunch of ways. Information like the location and date are baked into each file. This is called EXIF data.
Apple’s fanciest implementation of this is in the Memories tab. It offers up little neat packages of images it thinks are related, largely by date and location. Its reminders can sometimes not be welcome, however.
However, to do the job manually you are better off using the Places tab and the search bar. In Places you can see a map, with pins placed where you took photos. It’s a quick way to filter down to collections of photos you took on holiday, for example. And if you go to the same place regularly you’ll see a chronological timeline of images when you select a pin.
Apple’s photo filtering is a lot more advanced than this, though. Use the search bar and you can filter by keywords like “cloud”, “sunset”, “dog”, “cat” or “pizza”. It uses machine learning to recognise scenes and object. Or, of course, you can search for places instead.
Bear in mind Apple has an Americanised vocabulary, so you’ll have more luck with “cookie” than “biscuit”.
For the first stage of photo curation, try manually making an album and dumping a series of shots from a holiday or day trip. We’ll deal with picking out the top images later.
Want to start an album or a specific person? Look at the People tab. Apple will recognise similar-looking faces and group them together, but leaves naming to you so it doesn’t come across like it is constantly scanning your photos and linking them to your contacts.
