So you have an iPhone and you’ve become a shutterbug. You can’t stop taking photos of your food, your friends, your kids, grandkids, and all the cool things you’ve seen on that recent vacation. Now you look at the Photos app and say to yourself, “how on Earth am I gonna find anything?”
Welcome to Photos Organizer Primer.
Let’s get started. On the bottom row of Photos app are four icons:
Photos: One massive list all your images and videos, sorted by date and location.
For you: An Auto-curated grouping of images based on date, location, and the people in them.
Albums: Folders and groups of images that you can create and edit.
Search: Quickly seek out photos by the things in them.
iCloud Syncing
First and foremost, make sure you are logged into the same iCloud account, across all your devices. That way the iCloud magic can happen: photos taken on the iPhone appear across all devices. Plus, any changes you make to an image on one device, like editing the image, creating albums, or adding keywords, will appear across all the devices.
Folders and Albums
My preference is slightly old school with enhancements. Create Albums to group photos together, then create Folders to group Albums together. That way, you can group all the albums by year, for example. Then iCloud will sync this organization structure across all your devices.
Sharing Photos
There are many ways to share photos. Shared Albums are a great way to let others see large numbers of photos. Select the images, and then create a shared album. Then you can add the email address or iCloud email of your friends to share the images. If the friend has an iCloud account and Apple devices, the Album simply gets added to their collection. For friends with non-Apple devices, they will receive an email with a link to a web site of the images.
Learn More here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207368
