How to organize iPhone 6s photos in iOS 9
With iPhone 6s' 12MP iSight and 5MP FaceTime cameras, Apple bumped the specs of the world's most popular digital shooter, giving users a good excuse to create mountains of data. Using iOS 9's built-in Photos app can help you manage this flood of photographs from the moment you press the shutter button.
I take a couple hundred photos per day. Most are landscapes, animals and sky scenes, mixed in with sometimes hundreds of screenshots. No matter how much content you generate, the "fire and forget" nature of mobile photography can quickly lead to unmanageable photo libraries. The problem is most pronounced in iPhones with large storage capacities, which let you shoot with reckless abandon.
Fortunately for heavy users like myself, the aggregation and collation features Apple built into the iOS 9 Photos app can help with basic organization before you even think about comprehensive cataloging.
When you first open the Photos app in iOS 9, you are presented with up to three navigation options: Photos, Albums and, if you are sharing photos with a friend, Shared. In previous versions of Photos, when you clicked on Albums you were presented with Camera Roll, which is a collection of every photo and video on your iPhone, a Favorites album, Bursts for photos taken in rapid succession and Recently Deleted.
New iOS 9 Albums (left) and photo scrub bar.
In addition to Camera Roll's name change to "All Photos," two new albums have been added to Albums in iOS 9: Selfies and Screenshots. The Selfies album contains shots taken with the front-facing FaceTime camera and the Screenshots album contains images captured by pressing the sleep/wake and home buttons simultaneously. iOS 9 automatically populates Favorites, Bursts, Selfies and Screenshots with associated content.
These albums are hard coded into iOS 9 and cannot be renamed, reordered or removed. Albums will, however, hide if you do not have any photos of that type. I usually don't have selfies on my iPhone, therefore that album never shows up.
It should be noted that all stored photos will be placed in their respective albums based on metadata, even those not captured by your iPhone. For example, selfies taken on a friend's phone and imported via Messages or AirDrop go into your Selfies album.
When you open a single photo in iOS 9 there is now a "scrub bar" at the bottom of the screen to quickly browse through photos in the album you are viewing. You can "scrub" left and right through your entire collection or single albums. At the bottom of the screen are icons to share, favorite, or delete.
One way to quickly add photos to an easily accessible album is to tap on the heart-shaped icon that appears below individual pictures. Doing so sends that photo, Live Photo or video to the Favorites album, which is near the top of Photos' file hierarchy. Further, content can be automatically removed from Favorites by deselecting the heart button.
For an aggregated view of all your content, select Photos at the lower left of the main Photos app screen to browse by date and location, broken down by Year, Collections (groupings by location and date) and Moments (specific dates). From the Moments screen you can click Share to share a block of photos the app has grouped together. If you tap Select at the upper right, you can select each group of photos to delete if desired.
You can add as many additional albums by clicking on the "+" icon in the top left-hand corner and selecting pictures from Years, Collections and Moments. These newly created albums are not smart, however, meaning you have to add and delete photos manually.
The locations of photos are extremely accurate which really help you remember where you took that photo of a beautiful sunset or mountain vista. Photos shared with you show up on this map as well if the sender had location turned on. Location can easily be turned off if you want to share photos, but not your location. Navigate to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Camera > Never to disable location sharing.
I take a couple hundred photos per day. Most are landscapes, animals and sky scenes, mixed in with sometimes hundreds of screenshots. No matter how much content you generate, the "fire and forget" nature of mobile photography can quickly lead to unmanageable photo libraries. The problem is most pronounced in iPhones with large storage capacities, which let you shoot with reckless abandon.
Fortunately for heavy users like myself, the aggregation and collation features Apple built into the iOS 9 Photos app can help with basic organization before you even think about comprehensive cataloging.
When you first open the Photos app in iOS 9, you are presented with up to three navigation options: Photos, Albums and, if you are sharing photos with a friend, Shared. In previous versions of Photos, when you clicked on Albums you were presented with Camera Roll, which is a collection of every photo and video on your iPhone, a Favorites album, Bursts for photos taken in rapid succession and Recently Deleted.
New iOS 9 Albums (left) and photo scrub bar.
In addition to Camera Roll's name change to "All Photos," two new albums have been added to Albums in iOS 9: Selfies and Screenshots. The Selfies album contains shots taken with the front-facing FaceTime camera and the Screenshots album contains images captured by pressing the sleep/wake and home buttons simultaneously. iOS 9 automatically populates Favorites, Bursts, Selfies and Screenshots with associated content.
These albums are hard coded into iOS 9 and cannot be renamed, reordered or removed. Albums will, however, hide if you do not have any photos of that type. I usually don't have selfies on my iPhone, therefore that album never shows up.
It should be noted that all stored photos will be placed in their respective albums based on metadata, even those not captured by your iPhone. For example, selfies taken on a friend's phone and imported via Messages or AirDrop go into your Selfies album.
When you open a single photo in iOS 9 there is now a "scrub bar" at the bottom of the screen to quickly browse through photos in the album you are viewing. You can "scrub" left and right through your entire collection or single albums. At the bottom of the screen are icons to share, favorite, or delete.
One way to quickly add photos to an easily accessible album is to tap on the heart-shaped icon that appears below individual pictures. Doing so sends that photo, Live Photo or video to the Favorites album, which is near the top of Photos' file hierarchy. Further, content can be automatically removed from Favorites by deselecting the heart button.
For an aggregated view of all your content, select Photos at the lower left of the main Photos app screen to browse by date and location, broken down by Year, Collections (groupings by location and date) and Moments (specific dates). From the Moments screen you can click Share to share a block of photos the app has grouped together. If you tap Select at the upper right, you can select each group of photos to delete if desired.
You can add as many additional albums by clicking on the "+" icon in the top left-hand corner and selecting pictures from Years, Collections and Moments. These newly created albums are not smart, however, meaning you have to add and delete photos manually.
The locations of photos are extremely accurate which really help you remember where you took that photo of a beautiful sunset or mountain vista. Photos shared with you show up on this map as well if the sender had location turned on. Location can easily be turned off if you want to share photos, but not your location. Navigate to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Camera > Never to disable location sharing.
Comments
I ask because deleting a photo from All Photos apparently also deletes that same photo from any album where the photo exists. In my experiment last night, I created the Family album and then copied 5 photos to Family. In the interest of keeping my All Photos small(ish), I then deleted those 5 photos from All Photos, thinking that I already had another (safe) copy of the photos in Family, but... no. The photos disappeared from both albums.
That is correct. All Photos is the bucket of all your pictures, and each photo in an album contains a reference to that original photo (not really the photo itself or even a copy of it). If you delete a 'photo' in an album, it has simply forgotten that reference, but the original photo remains in All Photos. However, if you delete a photo in All Photos, it is gone from your collection, and therefore from any album that might have referenced it.
... if you delete a photo in All Photos, it is gone from your collection, and therefore from any album that might have referenced it.
Thanks.
One final clarification:
Traditionally, when I connected to iTunes and uploaded photos to my computer, I would select the option to delete those same photos from my iPhone after the upload finishes. I did that for housekeeking reasons; clean up my device to create space for NEW photos. But based on your explanation above, I should NOT do that for any photos that I want to remain in an album (such as the Family one I mentioned), right? I guess the right procedure is to upload the photos, not select the 'delete from device' option (which applies to ALL photos in that upload batch), and instead go into my iPhone Photos app and manually delete the photos that I truly want to delete because they're not in the Family album. Is that correct?
WTF?! Hundreds of photos a day?
Also, the method for putting a photo into a new folder is not intuitive, and is grossly inadequate. In email, when you open an individual email a folder icon displays in the tool bar, and when you click on that folder it displays a list of all folders. When you then click on the folder in the list that you want to file that email in, it automatically transfers that email into it. Why the hell didn't they use that method for easily sorting photos? Currently in photos, if you want to put a specific photo manually into a folder you can't simply copy and paste, you have to go to that folder then hit edit at the top, then click "add" at the very bottom, then again it takes you all the way to the bottom of all photos, then once again you have to scroll through all your 100's of photos to find the one you want to add to that folder. THIS IS ASS BACKWARDS AND TOTALLY Fk'd UP! Basically, there is no real way to EASILY AND EFFECTIVELY manage photos on the iOS device itself.
I share your frustration. Last night I spent 2 hours trying to understand the UI of moving photos among folders (shared, non-shared). I found it very -- and unnecessarily -- confusing. Somewhat like the Apple Music UI: a lot is possible but you have to invest a lot of trial-and-error time figure it out. Seems counter to Apple's traditional reputation for intuitive UIs.
On the Albums screen, when you copy a photo from All Photos to a distinct album (e.g., "Family"), does it create a separate instance of that photo or is the album just a logical grouping of a subset of photos that actually exist in All Photos?
I ask because deleting a photo from All Photos apparently also deletes that same photo from any album where the photo exists. In my experiment last night, I created the Family album and then copied 5 photos to Family. In the interest of keeping my All Photos small(ish), I then deleted those 5 photos from All Photos, thinking that I already had another (safe) copy of the photos in Family, but... no. The photos disappeared from both albums.
What happened was perfectly logical and expected behavior. Not sure why you would think the photos are "duplicated". They're just tagged and their instances show up in those albums, non destructively. The originals are in all photos. That's the only way it makes any sense, and allows for constant editing and re-organization of albums without making a giant mess of duplicates and accidental deletions of originals.
Because their are NO folders in iOS Photos.
Those are "virtual collections" AKA Albums.
The only thing that ever goes into those "folders" is an ALIAS to the actual photo which lives in the one and only Photo dump AKA Library.
A photo MUST be in the Library BEFORE it can be added to an Album (aka Collection).
NOTE: although I agree it would be far easier to explain to people if Apple found a way to obfuscate (hide) what actually is going on i.e. let people add directly to folders, even if the photo itself doesn't reside there.
See my post above to [@]FreeRange[/@] in regards to Photos.
The biggest problem is that traditional computer filing hierarchy systems (volumes, folders, data) on all platforms are in a state of flux at the moment.
Traditional filing systems also don't take into account where that data is necessarily scattered across a disk or volume. By allowing the volume and the OS to determine where the most efficient place to store data for fast access using OS intelligence, it's far more economical in power usage as well as what the user experiences in overall speed.
This is/was what ***ZFS+ was to deliver many years ago in OSX, but Apple found a way to do the above strictly in the OS. It's how (to a certain degree) Fusion drives work i.e. always keeping most recent data on the SSD (fast access) and pushing less used data off to the spinning hard drive (slower access).
What does this all have to do with Photos and Music?
To put it as simple as possible, Apple decided long ago in order to get ready for the eventual ZFS(+) filing system, that Libraries... basically databases of where a file should actually live *contiguously* on a live compressed and optimized volume ... and then through Meta and content tags, be easily indexed and "filed" in "virtual folders" AKA "Smart Folders"... either automatically by the host OS or user defined "smart collections".
This is why it's SMART to start using multiple keywords (Tags in OSX), faces, GPS, favorites, etc. now rather than later. OSX has started with Yosemite with multiple tags (instead of simple Spotlight comments from the past) and keywords; Google has I believe since it's inception always used Open Meta tagging for their databases, email and search... AND with the recent Windows 10, Microsoft is jumping on board as well.
+++ The power of meta tags is lost on the majority of people, since it's rare when I run across someone that knows how to utilize Boolean searches, whether in Google searches or on OSX (Boolean searches are new to Windows 10). (See Below)
+++ (Smart) Folders = automatically OS created or user created "saved searches" across volumes or folders.
+++ Contiguously = All bits and bytes being as close to each other as possible; NOT scattered across free volume space, also known as fragmentation.
+++ ZFS and ZFS+ have been delayed IFAIK due to patent/licensing restrictions by Sun. In addition I don't believe the spinning hard drives being used earlier were all that more efficient to create such a disruption at the time. Also, due to the speed of SSDs and the conservation of power resources needed for mobile devices, we're kind of stuck between both paradigms for the time being.
+++ On the horizon are so called "organic drives" still being developed from our friends at IBM, where once feasible and available, will take the place of flash storage and SSDs which will most definitely benefit from the efficiency of ZFS or even something better(?)
Perform a Boolean query (Yosemite and also now with El Capitan)
A Boolean query uses AND, OR, and NOT (known as Boolean operators) to narrow search results. You can also use a minus sign (–), which means AND NOT, to exclude items when you search.
Here are examples of what you might type in the search field when you use Boolean operators:
author:tom OR author:thom searches for items authored by Tom or Thom, if you don’t know the exact spelling of his name.
trip -france searches for items that contain the word “trip” but not “france,” so results might include photos from a trip to Spain but not to France.
kind:message date:6/29/14-7/25/14 NOT date:7/14/14 searches for email messages dated from 6/29/14 through 7/25/14, but excludes those dated 7/14/14.
Search for metadata attributes
Most items contain metadata that describes the item contents, how it was created, and other attributes. For example, when you take a digital photo, information such as the camera model, the aperture, and the focal length are among the many attributes automatically stored in the file as metadata. To view metadata for a file, select the file, then choose File > Get Info.
Here are examples of how you might use metadata attributes in your search:
trip kind:document searches for the word “trip” in documents only.
author:tom searches for all items written by Tom.
meeting date:tomorrow searches for meetings you have planned for tomorrow.
kind:images created:5/16/14 searches for images created on a specific date.
kind:music by:“glenn miller” searches for music by Glenn Miller.
modified:<=6/29/14 searches for items modified on or before a specific date.
Per your comment, then why not, as with the email system, when you have a photo open, have an album icon showing in the tool bar that when clicked would pop up a scrollable album list, and when you touched the desired album, an alias would be placed in the album? Seems simple and straight forward. Right?
Yes. They could and should. Anything in my opinion that gets people to organize their data as fast as possible, so if there's an Album in place and someone wants to put it there from the get-go: alias gets placed and the original goes to the main Library where it should be.
No argument from me here. Just explaining what's happening and how it works now, that's all.
I'm actually not certain how the iPhone and iTunes work with photos compared to the Photos app for MacOS. I usually download and erase, as you suggest, but since I haven't migrated to Photos yet (waiting until I understand it better and it can fully replace Aperture and iPhoto, both of which I still use), I can't really help you with that.
Good Luck
Thanks for your detailed feedback.
This reminded me that someone once said people fall into 2 categories:
1. "Sorters" ... place items in folders
2. "Searchers" ... leave items in one group and tag them to enable future searches
I'm a "sorter", but I realize the world is now favoring "searchers". As did you. I have to change with the times!
I am 64 years old. So I can remember when MSDos version 2.11 was introduced in the mid 1980's. Suddenly you could create folders on your floppy disk. - Ever since then PC users have become used to believe that storing data in folders was the right thing to do. And it was, then, because it was the only available sorting option.
But sorting does only work if your data (document, photo, music number) only needs to be found in one folder. When your data has to be in more than one place at once you have two options: 1) Make a copy; but then you have two data sets or more and have to maintain order in a very difficult way. 2) Use keywords or "tags" to attach to your document. Then you search for the keyword or "tag" when you need to find the document or photo. - Then you only have one document/photo but you can find it in a lot of different ways.
You probably know about playlists for your music. Imagine that a folder or a smart folder in Photos is a playlist. You only store the music number once, but you can put a reference to the number in as many playlists as you want. It is the same system with Photos and folders.
I have about 80 "keywords" in my Mac Photos app. I also have a smart album for each of the keywords. Also for keywords i have not used yet. But when I start using a keyword I already know where to find the photo. In the smart album for that keyword.
I also have ONE smart album containing ALL my keywords. This particular album negates the search for keyword " keyword is not xxx". I use the "all" criteria for the searches within the smart album. - This way I can find all the photos which do not (yet) have an attached keyword.
This works very nicely on my Mac. - But there is a problem on my iPad which is sync'ed through iCloud: The "smart folder" type of folder is not sync'ed to iPad or iPhone IOS 9. Only the "not smart folder" type is sync'ed. So I have to make a little collection of photos of my dogs and children in a "not smart folder". This then gets sync'ed to my iPad and iPhone.
Uups!
My post was posted prematurely. I also wanted to write this:
The "not smart albums" are synchronized to my iPad/iPhone. But I have chosen the "optimized" version of synchronization. For reasons of space, of course. - When I am on a wi-fi network this is OK. But when I am not on a wi-fi network, I only have the "optimized" version of my photo available. - I am wondering how I can control that I always have the complete version of selected photos available off-line without having to store all originals off line. I do not have storage capacity for that. - And I do not want to experiment with different libraries or other complicated solutions.
Apples solution will have to be based on the "not smart folder" type. Because, the "smart album folder" type with keywords can only work when all the photos are available: as they are on my Mac.
I guess I'll just have to wait for an app upgrade. Unless someone here knows the answer.
hi, not sure if my previous post went through but I'll try it one more time. So I'm a new apple user, with a 6S on the 9.0 version. Currently the default for displaying Photos appear to be oldest-newest. I would like to change this setting to show newest first. I explored around the Photos App with no luck and I couldn't see any options on the Settings:Photos & Camera. Can you let me know how I could achieve this newest-oldest order for the photos?
It should have random access..
My app handles everything I want. Video Audio Pictures and Text
I keep all my emails in one huge text file. Searchable at 20,000,000 cps
It can randomly pick a video then a random segment to play.
All my passwords and internet urls / favorites in my notes file
see "nobody shares knowledge better than this" and they don't.
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/13917.aspx
Let me share my experience. I own an iPhone since 1.5y and I found its photo organization really frustrating. Apple is renown for building easy stuff but in this case they failed. I got fed up as it turned that I had to help my wife (we bought the iPhones together) _every_ time she wanted to create an album and add photos to it. I have some academia background and decided to spend my nights over several months on analyzing photo management apps and researching on the topic. I came up with the following two main findings:
1) Apple's concept of a Camera Roll that holds all photos, which can only get logically assigned to albums, contradicts to what people know from file organization, which is what they are used to because they worked with it in the last decades (I interviewed people aged 18-55).
2) All photo organization apps I analyzed, simply disregard the fact the we use our phone cameras differently than our portable cameras back in the days. With our phone cameras we not only take family, vacation, and fun photos, but also lots of mundane photos like screenshots, book pages or similar. So the photo organization apps try to be one-size-fits-all, which makes photo organization a pain.
I then hired an iOS developer and let him develop an app that I named Utiful to try to solve these problems. Utiful acts as an additional photo organization storage locally on the iOS device. With it, the user can physically _move_ photos out of the Camera Roll to simple folders that are in Utiful. The idea is that the user can move _all_ mundane photos out of the Camera Roll to Utiful to reach two goals: I) With the mundane things moved to Utiful, the Camera Roll turns into an amazingly beautiful timeline of all the nice family and vacation photos; II) One can organize the mundane yet useful photos in Utiful folders with sticker labels on them, to be able to find these photos with just two taps when you need them, instead of endlessly scrolling through the Camera Roll.
For me, my wife, and a bunch of twenty friends with iPhones around us who use the app, the app works wonders. We live in Vienna, Austria, and I don't have access to app users from the US, so I can't say whether they find the app that useful as we here do. If you guys wanna have a look at the app, I'd be more than grateful to hear your critical feedback. Here's the App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/utiful-divide-rule-your-photo/id1034958660?ls=1&mt=8
It would be really great to make photo organization easier for iOS users.
Cheers from Vienna, Pavel
https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html