Posts Tagged → photos

Spatial Video Demonstrations

John Gruber spent more time with Vision Pro, focusing on the Photos app, including Spatial Video and panoramic photos. In short, John was impressed, and this is just the first iteration of this stuff.

These things are hard to predict. (It took a pandemic for video chat to get legs.) Nevertheless, as families and friends are spread to the four winds, this holodeck-like experience could be a big deal. Moreover, I’ve lost enough people to appreciate how memories fade. My dad died over 30 years ago, and I’d give a lot to be able to feel his presence again, even if just part of a silly spatial video file.

If this takes off, it could become a killer feature for Apple’s future Vision products. And as explained by John, when iOS 17.2 releases you’ll be able to start recording those spatial videos immediately with your iPhone 15 Pro, even if you don’t yet own a Vision Pro headset.

Last Call for Introductory Pricing on the Photos Field Guide



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I have been thrilled with the warm reception for the Photos Field Guide. I didn’t know what to expect, releasing it during a pandemic, but the feedback has been excellent, and customers are writing to tell me how much better they are at taking, organizing, and finding their photos.

Now that all of the transcripts and the ePub are in place, it’s time for the last call on introductory pricing for the Photos Field Guide. The price will go up to $29 later this week. If you want in on the discount price, now is the time.

Photos Field Guide Transcripts

The Photos Field Guide now has all closed-captioning transcripts in place, along with a written transcript of each course located below each video. Hooray!

I am also trying something new with the Photos Field Guide. I have added a PDF and ePub version of the complete transcript. This is not a written Field Guide, but instead a compiled version of the transcripts that you can download and read, if that’s your thing. It’s all available now for existing customers. Log in and go crazy.

Announcing the New Photos Field Guide



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I am happy to announce the release of the all new Photos Field Guide. 

THE SHORT VERSION

  • 122 videos, fully streamable, plus combined versions for easier download.

  • Nearly six hours of video tutorials.

  • Full coverage for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.

  • Everything is broken up and paced so novice to advanced users can get on board and master their photos.

Get it now with the introductory price.

THE LONG VERSION

This second edition of the Photos Field Guide contains nearly six hours of video tutorials that will up your photo game on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Over the years, organizing, editing, and sharing your photos with multiple devices have come to feel like chasing a mythical white whale. Not anymore. The Photos Field Guide delivers the goods, and this video course teaches you how. This course has in-depth video explaining how to get the most from the Photos app on the iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.

Please note the introductory price of $24 will go to $29 shortly after launch.

OVERVIEW AND LIBRARY MANAGEMENT

While Photos attempts to make your initial setup simple and easy, there can be complications. What if you have more than one existing photo library? What if you’ve got folders of photographs sprinkled all over your hard drive? All of these can be imported into Photos, but you’ve got to know the ropes. This video screencast shows you all kinds of tricks to run Photos on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Photos also can use iCloud Photo Library to make sharing photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone so much easier. The Field Guide walks you through the initial iCloud setup, including advice on which cloud storage to use and how to get the initial upload of your photo library done with as little pain and suffering as possible.

TAKING PHOTOS

While “point-and-shoot” works amazingly well, you can do so much more when taking your photos with a modern iPhone. This section includes multiple videos explaining how you can take photos from portrait mode to panoramas. This section also includes some photography basics to get you up and running.

PHOTOGRAPHY ACCESSORIES

There are some great affordable and compact accessories to improve your iPhone photos. Learn about useful tripods, lenses, and lighting sources that fit in your pocket. 

PHOTOS ON THE IPHONE AND IPAD

Multiple sections and videos cover a complete soup-to-nuts treatment of how to take, organize, find, edit, and share your photos in the Photos app for iPhone and iPad. 

ORGANIZING PHOTOS

Photos uses an intuitive organizational structure that lets you see your pictures grouped in multiple ways. You have thousands of photos. Photos will make it easier to find your favorites. You can even search your library so if someone says, “Hey! Quick, find me that photo of Aunt Trudy from 2004 wearing that Juicy tracksuit!”, you can deliver the goods. This stuff sounds complicated. It’s not. By the time you get to the end of this video, you’ll be able to embarrass Aunt Trudy in no time flat.

EDITING PHOTOS

Photos also has a surprisingly large toolset to make your photos better. You can do simple edits, like cropping and rotating, but you can also make complex adjustments to color and light. On the Mac, there are even more tools including a histogram, sharpening, definition, noise reduction, vignette and level adjustments. If all of this sounds like greek to you now, that’s okay. After watching the video, it won’t.

The video also explains Photos’ built-in filters and how they can be an excellent jumping-off point for making your photos look great. It also covers the semi-magical “enhance” button. If that’s not enough, there are workflows to get your photos out of the Photos app and into an external editor for further work on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

SHARING PHOTOS

With the new Photos app, there are many ways to share your images with friends and family from something as simple as an email to full-blown shared iCloud albums. This section covers all of the sharing options.

PHOTOS ON THE MAC

All those cool tricks covered in the iPhone and iPad are also fully explained and demonstrated on the Mac. Learn how to organize, find, edit, and share your photos from the Mac just as easily as you can on the iPhone and iPad. 

VIDEO

Believe it or not, Photos can manage, edit, and share your video files too. This section covers the best practices for managing video files in Photos and its limited editing capabilities.

BACKUP

No photo management system is complete without a thorough backup system. The Photos Field Guide concludes explaining backup strategies and techniques. This section also demonstrates how to export images from Photos for additional backup.

THERE’S MORE!

There are more topics covered in this Photos Field Guide including a primer on digital photo formats, popular third-party photo applications, application settings for the Photos and Camera apps, and more. 

Get it now with the introductory price.

Photo Sorting and Pruning on iPhone

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures lately, and if you looked at my iPhone, you’d see a lot of photo bloat. You know what I mean, right? You take five pictures of people in one pose when you just need one. There is nothing wrong with that. Often it turns out to be picture number 2, 3, 4, or 5 that is the real keeper. The challenge is quickly getting rid of the non-keepers.


Flic Screenshot – Why so blurry? (Click to enlarge)

For a while now I’ve been using Flic for this. Flic is a straightforward iPhone app that displays photos from your photo library and lets you quickly keep or discard them. Swipe right to keep, swipe left to trash. The app is a great idea and an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff as your sort through photos. On vacation, I would go through this app every evening and have a more-or-less pruned photo library on days where I took a lot of pictures. However, lately I’ve been unhappy with Flic. My problem is that its picture preview mode renders images a little blurry. In my haste to get through photos, I tend to forget this and more than once I found myself trashing good photos. 

So I started looking for a replacement and landed on an optimistically named app, Best Photos. This app isn’t quite as simple as Flic. With Best Photos, you can flick up and down between photos and tap a trash can or heart icon to either trash or favorite image. You can also compare two photos on the screen at once. Best Photos is more powerful than Flic but still generally allows you to sort through images quickly. Most importantly, its photo renders are much better than those in Flic so I can do a better job in assessing keepers, which was entirely the point.

Because Best Photos already has you using gestures to move between images, it would be nice if they added a gesture to Trash or Favorite photos, rather than tapping an icon. Nevertheless, Best Photos is a better experience overall for me particularly because of the way it renders the images. 


Best Photos Screenshot (Click to enlarge)

This problem could be solved in the Apple Photos app with a setting that turns off deletion confirmation, but I have to admit I’m not entirely certain I’d want deletion to be that easy.

The Photos Video Field Guide



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Late last year I started outlining a new MacSparky Field Guide on photo management. It was one sweet outline and I’d even started writing words. Then I got my hands on the Photos beta and realized that Photos did something pretty remarkable. Photos manages large photo libraries loads better than iPhoto ever did and the iCloud Photo Library works far better than I ever expected. I started revising the “photo management” outline until I realized this was no longer a comparison of competing photo management services and instead an in-depth manual for Photos.

At that point I scrapped the outline and instead produced a Video Field Guide explaining how to get the most from Photos. After a few months of work, here it is.

The Photos Video Field Guide is a 2.5 hour screencast that teaches you how to install and use Apple’s Photos Application and sync all of your photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone using iCloud Photo Storage. Managing your photos with multiple devices has, over the years, come to feel like chasing a mythical white whale. Not anymore. Photos delivers the goods and this screencast teaches you how.

Topics Include:

1. INITIAL SETUP

While Photos attempts to make your initial setup simple and easy, there can be complications. What if you have more than one existing photo libraries? What if you’ve got folders of photographs sprinkled all over your hard drive? All of these can be imported into Photos but you’ve got to know the ropes. This video screencast shows you all tricks to run Photos on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Photos also can use iCloud Photo Library to make sharing photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone easier than anyone ever thought possible. The Video Field Guide walks you through the initial iCloud setup, including advice on which cloud storage to use and how to get the initial upload of your photo library done with as little pain and suffering as possible.

2. PHOTO MANAGEMENT

Photos uses an intuitive organizational structure that lets you see your pictures grouped by years, collections, moments, and individual photos. This Video Field Guide shows you exactly how it works and sprinkles in several power tricks to make managing your library even easier. Once you’ve sorted that out, Photos also has options to create custom and smart albums, where the program seeks out photos for you pursuant to your instruction.

Photos also has specialized libraries that can identify the faces of your family and friends. You can even search you library so if someone says, “Hey! Quick! Find me that picture of Uncle Ralph from April 2007 wearing that ballerina tutu!”, you can deliver the goods. This stuff sounds complicated. It’s not. By the time you get to the end of this video, you’ll be able to embarrass Uncle Ralph in no time flat.

3. PHOTO EDITING

Photos also has a surprisingly large toolset to make your photos better. You can do simple edits, like cropping and rotating, but you can also make complex adjustments to color and light. On the Mac there are even more tools including a histogram, sharpening, definition, noise reduction, vignette and level adjustments. If all of this sounds like greek to you now, that’s okay. After watching the video it won’t.

The video also explains Photos built in filters and how they can be an excellent jumping off point for making your photos look great. It also covers has the semi-magical “enhance” button. If that’s not enough, there are workflows to get your photos out of the Photos app and into an external editor for further work on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

4. PHOTO SHARING

With the new Photos app, there are many ways to share your images with friends and family from something as simple as an email to full-blown shared iCloud albums. This section of the video covers all of the sharing options from the Mac and iOS. The Photos Video Field Guide also demonstrates how to make books, calendars, and cards from the Photos application on the Mac.

5. VIDEO

Believe it or not, Photos can manage your video files too. This section covers the best practices for managing video files in Photos and its limited editing capabilities.

6. BACKUP

No photo management system is complete without a thorough backup system. The Photos Video Field Guide concludes explaining backup strategies and techniques. This section also demonstrates how to export images from Photos for additional backup.

The screencast is two and a half hours and fully bookmarked. You can buy it now for $9.99.

Did you ask for a sample video? I thought so. Here you go.

∞