Organizing Your Photos

Once upon a time, we had computers without any photo organization. Yes, we had file organization, and we had files that were images. So we had a way of organizing our digital photos. We put them in folders. And if we liked, we could put folders within other folders. That was it. To me, because we couldn’t see these images at a glance, it was worse than before we had computers, not better.

Apple Photos, like iPhoto before it, is basically an organizational database of all the media we add to it. That database is stored in a container called a library. Apple Photos keeps track of the images and videos we put into it. When we add (or import) media, we are storing information about that media in the library structure. By default, we also put a copy of the photo or video inside the library as well.

LIBRARIES
One Photos library can theoretically contain a million or more images/videos. But there are practical limits. Your Mac must be fast enough and have enough memory to keep up with the size of your library. There must also be plenty of free space to deal with a large library. My clients mostly talk about how many photos they have. But when we think of libraries, photos usually means images and videos, and videos take up a lot more space than photos.

WORKING WITH PHOTOS (organizing your collection of images & videos)
My clients often ask me to help them organize their photos. Sometimes most of their media is in Apple Photos, and they want me to train them to create folders and albums, delete duplicates, and generally make sense of their collection of images and videos. I can do all this for you, but with a large library, this can be a very time-consuming project. It often makes more sense to do this with you until you get the hang of doing it yourself.

At other times, I am asked to consolidate many Photos libraries into one all-inclusive super-library. I scour all your computers, external drives, and other media for loose images and video files, and include them in the library. I also merge any other libraries that I find along the way.

DIGITIZING YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
It is hard to send off your shoe boxes of old photographs to a company that will scan them for you. I have decided it is even harder to risk those treasured memories to fire (or other natural disaster).

After your photographs are scanned, I can help you organize them in Apple Photos.

WORKING WITH HUGE LIBRARIES
It takes a lot of work to keep very large libraries organized. It is so much harder when this time is spent in frustration with a slow computer, or worse, one that keeps crashing when a large library is open. There are two approaches to making this process more enjoyable.

1) Buy a very fast Mac with plenty of RAM memory. You can check with me about whether your existing computer fits this bill, or how to configure a new computer that you are about to purchase. Or…

2) You can break up your collection into multiple libraries that do not tax the computer quite so much. Some of my clients have many libraries, divided by subject or by date. I can create multiple libraries and show you how to make switching from one library to another an easy process.

WHERE TO START
It may help for you to schedule a support session with me and go over your choices.