How to use Apple Photos effectively

There are two ways to get photos into Photos on the Mac: capture them with an iPhone and let iCloud sync them, or import a file from the filesystem.

Capturing on iPhone

Let’s discuss the first option. If you’re taking photos with the iPhone, use iCloud to sync them to your Mac, in preference to other apps like Lightroom, which may convert the HDR photo to SDR. Or may convert a Live Photo to a still photo. Photos also lets you change capture settings in post, like changing the effect of a Live Photo, such as Long exposure, Loop or Bounce. For a portrait photo, you can change the aperture, or the effect like Natural Light, Studio Light, Contour Light (Mono) or Stage Light (Mono). If you’ve captured a slo-mo video, Photos lets you change the points at which it transitions from normal to slo-mo and back. If you’ve captured a Cinematic video, you can re-focus it in post. If you’ve captured a burst, Photos shows them all as one burst, rather than littering your library with a hundred separate photos. Photos also categorizes your captures automatically:

Don’t waste time manually categorising photos. Besides, the automatic categorisation can never get out of sync, unlike manually creating a Timelapses album, and later forgetting to add a new timelapse to it.

All this integration between the Mac and the iPhone will be lost if you use a different cloud service like Lightroom, so don’t¹.

There are a few alternatives to using iCloud:

1. You could plug the iPhone into the Mac, open Photos and import. Don’t do this — your edits will be lost.

2. If you use AirDrop, enable “All Photos Data”. Otherwise, your edits will be baked in and can’t be reverted. You can’t even see what how much you increased contrast (say). If you do enable “All Photos Data”, you’ll get a folder on your Mac. Drag and drop that entire folder into the Photos app. Not the files within it — if you do, you won’t have the flexibility of revisiting your edits later and tweaking them.

Importing

If, on the other hand, you already have the file on your Mac (say because you’ve recorded the screen or a video call), then, before you import it into Apple Photos, make some edits that you can’t after importing:

1. Rename the file² so that you can later use the file name to identify the photo.

2. Use Quicktime Player to:

   1. Combine two videos into one.

   2. Split a video into two.

   3. Trim out a clip from the middle of a video (say if you had an interruption like someone knocking at your door).

   4. Move a clip from the beginning of the video to the end. For example, you began your video by mentioning your website. After finishing recording, you realise that it’s better to mention it at the end.

   5. Copy a clip. In the above example, if you want to mention your website both at the beginning and the end, you could copy and paste the clip, rather than cutting and pasting.

3. Use HandBrake to:

   1. Convert stereo to mono³.

   2. Reduce file size by converting to HEVC or reducing the bitrate⁴.

Apple Photos can’t do the above, so you should do them in QuickTime Player or HandBrake before⁵ importing into Apple Photos.

Files vs Titles vs Captions

Apple Photos offers multiple ways to identify photos:

1. File names (indicated by the green arrow below)

2. Titles (indicated by the red arrow)

3. Captions (indicated by the yellow arrow)

4. Keywords: You can apply keywords like “sunset” or “lake” to a photo to identify what it’s about. These don’t sync to iPhone, so don’t use them. Instead, create a sunset or a lake album and add the photos to them. Or use these words in the caption or title and search for them. I won’t discuss keywords further in this post.

Filenames: every photo must have a file name, unlike a title and a caption, which are optional. So you might as well make them descriptive. You can’t edit it so, before you import a file to Photos, take a second to give it a descriptive name like “Lake at sunset.heic”. This doesn’t work for photos taken with the iPhone camera app, where you don’t have an opportunity to edit the photo before it’s imported into Photos. So in that case you have to use captions or titles.

Titles appear only on Mac; they don’t sync to iPhone. I’ve added titles to photos, only to not be able to find them on my iPhone when I needed them.

In the grid, you can see titles…

… and filenames:

but not captions.

To configure the grid to display these, in View > Metadata, check everything:

When exporting, you can preserve titles or file names, but not captions:

Exporting

If you haven’t edited the photo you want to export, Export Unmodified Original:

It will be better in quality and smaller.

If you’ve edited it, export it with the following settings⁶:

Choose Colour Profile: Original if it’s a photo and you want to retain vibrant colors, but if it’s more functional, such as a receipt, choose Most Compatible to avoid problems.

If the site you’re uploading to limits the dimensions to (say) 4000 x 3000, choose Size: Custom, and enter the lower of these two numbers, in this case 3000:

This ensures that both the width and height are <= 3000, in this example. In other words, that the long edge is <= 3000. Some sites limit not the dimensions of the photo but the size in bytes. In that case, use the dimension as a proxy to control the size.

If you’re going to post the photo publicly, you can exclude location.

Don’t choose Image > Edit With > Preview, because it downgrades to SDR. If you want to edit in Preview, do it manually by exporting a HEIC and double-clicking it.

1. If you’re using a different camera from an iPhone, like a mirrorless camera or an Android, then there isn’t a strong argument for iCloud.

2. which you can’t after importing.

3. Stereo can sometimes sound as if your voice is to one side. If you turn your head, the voice moves from your left ear to your right. This is distracting.

4. Otherwise, your iCloud quota will be exhausted. Especially if you’re recording the screen on the Mac, files are huge.

5. Not after, because you’ll lose Apple Photos’s non-destructive editing.

6. Choose HEIC to preserve HDR, especially for photos shot on an iPhone. Unlike PNG or TIFF, which results in an SDR photo, looking flat. HDR is one of these rare innovations that brings photos to life with zero effort from you as a photographer. You don’t want to go back.

You may be worried that HEIC is lossy. It is, but the compression is transparent, which means imperceptible to the eye, even zoomed in on a small part of an image:

There was no detail I could see in the TIFF 16-bit or PNG that I could not see in the HEIC. For example, it’s not as if I was able to read the license plates of one of the cars in the losslessly compressed image that I couldn’t in the lossily compressed image.

You may be worried about generation loss, but it doesn’t manifest for one or two generations. Besides, if you’re worried about data loss, you should be worried about losing dynamic range more than a minor loss of clarity in some corner of the photo.

Some apps still don’t support HEIC. For example, Gmail doesn’t let you embed a HEIC image. In such a case, export to JPEG. JPEG retains the dynamic range of the photo. Apple found a way to retrofit HDR to this 8-bit format!

So use HEIC or, when that’s not possible, JPEG.