📸 Master Your iPad Photos with iPadOS 18 – Exclusive Live Training! 📱

0:01 Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting Mac Whisperer live broadcast. I'm Frank, your host for today. And as always, it's amazing to have you here with us. Here's the question today. Does your iPad photo library feel like a digital jungle? Are you swiping, scrolling, searching endlessly just to find that one photo? Or maybe you're overwhelmed with screenshots, albums, duplicates. If so, you're in the right place because today we're transforming your iPad into a photo organizing powerhouse. Today, Dylan's going to be walking us through photos app on iPad OS8. From smart search features and pin collections to editing tricks and

0:47 advanced filtering tools, this session is packed. It's packed with gamechanging tips that'll help you take control of your photo chaos. We're going to cover album creation, organizing folders, using smart filters, how to use Apple's new visual intelligence to search by person, place it. It just goes on and on. Stick around for the um power tip. It's a brand new feature that will completely shift how few how you edit and organize your memories. And we have, of course, have our downloadable smart guide just for photos on the iPad. You lounge live, know what to do. Say hello. Tell us where you're from. What your photo challenge is. How often are you using an iPad photo library? Just

1:35 tell us where you're tuning in from, what your frustration is. It's also your chance to get your questions asked or answered by Dylan. Drop them in the t in the chat and we'll tackle them as we uh continue this session. And now let's welcome the master of memories, the architect of Apple Photo Mastery, Dylan Stewart, the Mac Whisperer. Welcome everyone. So glad to have you guys here. I always look forward to coming into our uh our membersonly streams. It's just friends and we're ready to get everything up to the next level. Today we're going to be talking about the iPad specifically and iPad photos. Um, you know, Apple made a ton of changes with iPad OS 18 and iOS 18,

2:21 and the photos app took the brunt of a lot of them with new terms, new ways of doing things, new ways of organizing stuff, and all sorts of functionality that, as per Apple's normal way of doing things, 99% of people don't know anything about. So after today's session, you're going to know better how to get around in your photos library on the iPad, how to create albums, how to create folders, what the differences between them. We're going to talk a little bit about the collection section, which is uh a new way of organizing all of your photos into albums and other categories. We're going to talk about some really basic editing tools so you kind of know the the essential pieces of how to make your pictures look better and some other fun tips along the way.

3:06 Uh before we get started, thank you everyone for letting me know where you are. Please hit that like button. Let's make sure that any of the other members know that we're here and know that we're having an amazing time so that we can bring as many people in as possible. Um this is a private members only. So I welcome all of you and before we even get rolling, I just want to say thank you. I think I think this is a I think this is a public by mistake. Oh, I think Yeah. Uh, I'm seeing a number of people rolling in here. So, welcome everybody. That's a glitch on our end. We didn't make it uh only for we'll take it. It's a more the marrier. It's a party. I love it. I love it. What that means is you can share this to people. You know, if you know anybody that needs help with

3:52 their photo or with their photos, with their iPad, go ahead and share this live stream. Invite them to join us. As long as it's public, we might as well blow the roof off, right, Frank? when we're here. Let's have a blast. Um, all right. Uh, anything we need to do before we jump in? I've got a I'm I'm sure everyone will be surprised. I have a lot to talk about. One of these days I'm going to show up on one of these calls. I'm going to be like, I got nothing on the agenda, guys. I got nothing. But that's not today. No, that'll be a rarity. Awesome. Uh, the other thing that I'm going to recommend is that if you do have a question, put the letter Q before it in the chat so that Frank can spot it

4:39 easier. There's a lot of people here and we expect even more coming in. Uh, I I'm ready. We might as well just hop over the iPad and get ourselves rolling here. Let's do that because, you know, we have a uh screen just for the iPad. Look at that. It's beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you, Frank. Thank you for building our little uh fake iPad screen for our friends here. Uh we want to start off with the very basics of the basics. I'm going to go ahead and open up the photo app and I'm going to show you around the new version of the photos app. Now, some of you may know that Apple has a new operating system coming out in September. It's called OS 26. It's going to rewrite the rules on a lot of different devices. There will be some changes to the photos app on the iPad OS

5:27 26 version, but what we're going to learn here is still going to carry over even if some of the things move around or the way things are done change slightly. What you're going to learn here is a foundation block that'll make it even easier for you to step into OS26 knowing what you're doing. I'm going to go ahead and hit into my photos app right here. You'll notice it's on my doc. Uh, any of you that do have an iPad, I highly recommend you set up your doc with everything you need on a regular basis instead of leaving apps scattered across page after page. Having it on the uh dock makes it so easy to get to things. And that's how I'm going to get to the photo set. For clarity, uh there are two different ways you can hold your iPad and it will reorient what we're doing depending on

6:13 which way we hold it. We're going to play with both today, mostly because I I made Frank create one for the vertical and I don't want to waste it. So, at some point, we're going to flip out of horizontal. In this case, I'm going to leave it on horizontal. I also want you to know, although I normally have a keyboard connected to my iPad. I'm intentionally not doing that in case we need to type anything. I want to make sure you can see what I'm typing and what I'm doing on the board. The first thing I want to talk about is how the new uh photos app is organized. And the way it works is like this. Let me make sure I got my right color here. There are two separate sections here. This section up at the top is the library itself. And this section down below is the collections. Now, it used

7:00 to be that we had albums on one page and uh shared stuff on one page and library on one page, but they consolidated it with this operating system to put all of your albums and organizational tools in the collection section down below. We'll talk about that in a moment. And the library of all your pictures up above. A lot of people got thrown off when they saw this and they weren't quite clear how to get into the library. It's really, really easy. All you're going to do is tag uh tug down on the photos here and I went so far I got all the way into a picture. Let me back out of that again. All you're going to do is tug down on the photos and it immediately engages you into your photo library. When you're inside of the photo library, it can be organized in several different ways. Down at the bottom, you can have

7:46 all photos, which is what we've currently got set right here, but you can also organize it by years or months. For simplicity, I'm going to click on years. Years is a great way to navigate around your photos because it allows you to go from today all the way, in my case, to 1925 in a single swipe. I have 80,000 photos. So, if I'm scrolling through the all section, getting between years takes forever. When you're inside of the years section, we'll come down a little further here into baby Dylan. And you click on any one of the years. It will enter you into the months section. And that's this little button right here. The months section shows you a basic couple of photos for each month. We're

8:32 going to get out of the 70s so it's a little easier for us to see that. Let's come down into 2018 here. And you'll see in the month view that we have a monthby-month breakdown with simple pictures. They prioritize videos, so you'll see videos playing on a lot of these screens. And it's a basic summary of some of the best events from that month in that year. But it doesn't show everything. The only view that shows you everything is the one called, shockingly all. Wonder came up with that name, Frank. I mean, just because it's all your photos. Um, when you're in the all section, you're going to see all of your pictures. And there's a couple of different ways we can organize this. The first thing I want you to know is that you can resize how it shows your

9:18 pictures. Right now, it's showing like 15 pictures across and 10 pictures down. And it's a lot of pictures. So, I'm going to take my fingers and I'm just going to spread them out a little bit and make it all a little bit bigger. You can go all the way up to a 3x 2 and 1/2 view if you like. And if we flip vertically, you'll have a different view of this as well, but I'm going to stay horizontal. I'll let you know, Frank, when we're going to go there, so you don't have to worry about it. Um, pinching in will allow you to see more pictures. So, you're going to find the right size for your pictures allows you to see the majority of what you want to see without it being so small that uh you can't do anything with it. So, there's a balance. And the spreading will allow you to set it to whatever you

10:04 want. And once you find the right level, if you leave it there, it will stay there the next time you come back. Okay. Now, we've also got this really important button right here. And I've recently realized that this button is showing up on uh the OS 26 things in a number of places. It's a new icon that means sort for clarity. Technology is filled with icons that tell you complicated things with a simple image. And Apple is better than almost anyone with making sure that the symbols they use are relatively universal. So having the sort button here and knowing that's a sort button, when you see that up- down arrow in other apps like reminders or notes or even in Safari, it means

10:50 sort. So we'll start to look at that. I'm going to go ahead and click on the sort button to show you what's underneath it here. And we're going to see first off the two most important settings hands down which relate to how your photos are actually going to be shown. There are two options. One is recently added and the other one is date captured. Now I want to explain the difference. Okay. Date captured is the date the photograph was taken. Recently added is the date it was added to your library. Now what's the difference Dylan? Here's the difference. Let's say that a friend you haven't seen in a couple of years sends you an old photo of the two of you together into your text messages and you add it into

11:37 your photo library. Well, when you come to your photo library, the tendency is to look down at the bottom for that picture. But in most cases, if it's an old picture, you won't find it at the bottom because the bottom is the most recently taken pictures. And that picture might have been taken one, two, three, 10 years ago. Unless you know the exact date and can come into the month section and find exactly where that was. Oh, that picture was in April of 2024. Unless you can do that, which most people can't do, you should change your sort to find that. Instead of sorting by date captured, if you change it to recently added, even though that particular picture was taken years ago, it will show up

12:23 right at the bottom of your library. Whenever anyone adds pictures and goes hunting for them, I want to roll my eyes because recently added solves that. And it solves it really easily and simply. So again, that sort button can either be set to recently added, meaning the date the picture got brought into my library versus date captured, the date the photograph was actually taken. In general, we do want to leave it on date captured for the majority of time because that's how we think about photos. We just took that picture and we want to kind of find it in the order that we took it, not somebody added this to my photo stream 10 minutes ago and now it's in front of everything else. In addition to those options in the sort section, you've got the ability to

13:10 filter. Let me get those things off there. You've got the ability to filter the iCloud shared library. The iCloud shared library, we actually did a live specifically about it. It is a unbelievably useful tool that allows you to take your photo library and share it with other people, up to five other people. They don't have to be family members. For me, my wife and I share pictures. We just had this nice event last weekend with her family. Uh you know, her playing guitar and taking pictures of the sunset and uh pictures of their little fairy farm, which I thought was super cute. Uh, but I don't want to remember to text these to Julie later. I don't want to airdrop them to her. I don't want to create a shared

13:56 photo album. Why not? Because shared albums degrade the quality, especially of videos, but also of photos. And shared albums, you don't have a lot of control over how they're organized. All I want is Julie to have the pictures that I took when I was with her. And by using the shared photo library, which I'm not going to get deep into, it can make that happen. Now, I want you to notice that we have the option of seeing both libraries. That means my personal library as well as the library that I share with Julie or I could just see my personal library or I could just see the shared library. When you're on both libraries, which is where I generally am, you're going to notice, and I'm going to scroll back until I find one. It's going to make me go all the way

14:42 back because all right, you're going to notice in the top corner of a lot of images this icon. This icon means it's been shared. It's part of the shared library. That means that both Julie and I have those photos. But as we come to the pictures from this recent trip, you'll notice there's no shared icon on them. That means she doesn't have them yet. So, I'm going to go ahead come to the top of this area right here. Click the select button in the upper right hand corner. We've got a select button. You do not need to individually tap and tap and tap and tap. It's going to make everybody crazy if you have to do it manually like that. Instead, you can swipe. So, I'm going to swipe across. Let me do it. I'm going to swipe. Oh, make it hard. I'm going to swipe across

15:27 and swipe down. Look at it selecting all of those. I'm just pulling my finger down. It's the fastest and easiest way to select things in this app. And once we've got all the pictures we need, I can then click the three dots in the lower right hand corner and I can move them to the shared library so that Julie can see them. A simple click like that. It's going to confirm that it's going to move all 250 of them. And now you should notice, zoom in for it. You should notice those little contact icons right there showing that the new photos have been shared. If you do not have a shared photo library, it get back there. If you do not have a shared photo library, it doesn't really matter whether you're on both libraries or personal or shared. It

16:12 might not even show you the option. But if you have a loved one and it's frustrating trying to sync photos with them, shared photo library is the solution. Below that, we've also got this filter tool. And this filter tool is really helpful because it can allow you to fine-tune what you're looking at quicker than almost any other way. So, if I come into my sort and I click on the filter, you're going to notice that I can immediately see all my favorites. One button click. I can immediately see all the videos. One button click. I can even see what photos I have not yet put into albums by clicking on the not in album section down at the bottom. And you can stack these separate things together. So you can see the not in albums that are favorites. None so far because I'm

16:59 pretty good at that. Or the ones that are videos that are favorites. There's only a handful of those. Or the photos that I've edited recently. This gives you all sorts of tools to quickly jump around, including the ability to see all of your screenshots in a single click. From this view, it prevents you from having to go to the collection section in order to find your favorites or your other pictures. It's a one-stop shop that unsurprisingly nobody knows is there and nobody's using and everybody complains about, but it's right there. In addition, under the view options sections, we've got a couple of other little tools here. You've got the ability to zoom in or zoom out. I like to pinch and spread. You've got the ability to change the aspect ratio grid.

17:45 Now, let me explain what that means. Right now, all of these photos look square. But most of us don't take square photos. We take rectangular photos that are either vertical or horizontal. But to make as many of them fit onto the screen as possible, this view makes them square. By coming into the sort, coming into view options, and changing it to the aspect ratio grid, notice that now we can see the full photo and a better understanding of whether it's horizontal or whether it's vertical. Uh, also within this view section, you can tell whether you want to see screenshots or not. If you are someone who takes a bajillion screenshots, if you deactivate that button, you can still find them elsewhere, but they

18:31 won't clog up your library, which is one of the other things people complained about with iOS 18, not realizing you can change that. So, if you do take a lot of screenshots and you don't want to see them, leave that unchecked. And uh that's kind of it for those settings. There's one last thing I want to talk about about the library before we move over to collections and that is searching. Okay, one of the YouTube videos I'll be making soon is literally how to search in photos because I realized this week that people think it's hard. People have a nasty tendency to think that they remember exact dates when things happened. So, they will be coming into their years mode and going, I remember that dog was a dog that we had in 2018.

19:17 So, it's got to be somewhere in 2018. And then they're going to scroll around. I think it was Christmas time that I saw that dog. And they're going to hunt forever and they're not going to find it. When people are searching by date, they think it makes sense. And some of them have even created albums and folders that just have the year on it or just have the date on it. But I dare you to pull a photo out of a photo album and tell me the exact day that was shot. You're never going to do it. And what's worse, you're actually going to be way off when you guess. Instead of this being something from 2018, it's actually 2012. Or maybe it's not even 2012, it's 2024. And you're going to be hunting around and juggling trying to find that specific picture. So, how do you do it differently? Well,

20:03 you use the search by clicking the search button in the upper right hand corner here. You'll get the option to search for not just any name of anything, but any topic. So, if I'm looking for cats, because apparently that's what I'm looking for here. I can type in cat, and it will give me different suggestions showing uh things that are cats that are are categories, showing the word cats inside of text. This icon means a standard search. This icon means a text search. This icon means the word cats is in something on the photo. So, as you see these different icons, they tell you what you're looking for. And so, if I just click on the general cats, it's going to immediately bring up pictures of cats.

20:50 No hunting, no fussing, no what year was this taken? One simple easy way to do it. But you can stack them. And that's the part that nobody realizes. You see, I don't want cats. I want me with a cat. So, I'm going to start typing my name here. And notice it suggests Dylan Stewart. That icon that we see here is a contact. It means whatever you're typing matches someone in your photo people and pets section. I'm going to click Dylan. And we're going to click search. And now look at what I've got. Immediately pictures of Dylan with cats. And yes, that is my leopard cat. And yes, he does like to hang out on my shoulder. This is my other cat here. Little tiny little gray one. So, by searching and stacking your search tools on top of each other,

21:37 you can find things easily. Was talking to a client. She was looking for pictures she took in India. She guessed the year twice wrong. Twice. And I'm sorry, not in not in India, in Sicily. And so when I showed her that, she could have just typed in Sicily and it would have shown that location if it was available. You can see for me it's not. So let's do a different location like Honolulu. You'll notice that it gives a different icon showing you a location. And if I click that icon, it's going to show me pictures taken in that location. So, you can use the search in a number of ways with vague terms like cats or boats or trees or dogs. Or you can be

22:23 more specific giving more information like who is with the the dog or what month was it in or uh what other things might be somewhere in the picture. The search tool is super powerful and nobody uses it. What you going to do? All I can do is teach you guys where the tools are. All right. Uh there's only one other thing I want to talk about in the library here. That's in the upper right hand. Actually, there's two things. I lied, Frank. Sorry. Two things. Let's start on the top left corner. You're going to notice this icon right here. This is your sidebar. If you've used the photos app on the computer, you know how valuable the sidebar is for navigation. Tapping that

23:08 opens it up. The sidebar shows all of your collections, which we'll discuss next, including utilities, including any specific albums, and makes it easy for you to quickly jump to anything without leaving the library. One of the biggest challenges that people have with this operating system is they think they have to keep leaving the library to find things, but you don't. The sidebar makes it easy to find any album that you're looking for really, really quickly and move around super simply. Now, when you do click on stuff, it's there's a tendency for that sidebar to go away, but you can always re-engage it by pressing that button. Last last thing for this section in the upper right hand corner, you're going to notice your profile image. If you have trouble with

23:55 pictures getting from one device to the other, you take them on your phone and you're like, "It takes forever for them to come to my computer." Or you take them on the iPad and you're like, "Why didn't they come over to my phone?" This is where you're going to solve that by tapping on the profile icon. It's going to give you additional information about your library, including how many pictures you've got. And if it's waiting to synchronize because it's on low power mode or it doesn't have a good Wi-Fi connection, there'll be a button right here that says sync. Now, pressing that will speed it up in transferring it will speed it up in transferring it from one device to the other. So, if you're airdropping things between your devices all the time because of how slow iCloud is synchronizing, click on the profile on your iPad and your phone. Your phone

24:42 is the worst culprit of it. The computer does a pretty good job, but the phone is terrible at it. Come in here and make sure it doesn't say sync. Now, I call that a little baby power tip because I get that question all the time. Inside of this profile area, you'll have little insights about your shared library, insights about pictures that were shared with you, and links that were shared with you, along with a ton of other tools, including the ability to create or manage the shared photo library we talked about, and to include specific events. Um, I don't change much in this section, but I think it's great that I don't have to go to the photos settings in order to make changes like this that it's all under that profile button. Pause.

25:30 Okay, that's our library. Uh, Frank, why don't we take a quick moment here before we talk about collections? And um, I got something. I think it's our our conversation for our smart guides, but not the release of the actual smart guide. Yeah. Uh, what's exciting is I know our academy members are aware of this page that the team put together, but I don't think a lot of the YouTube members or YouTube community knows about it. Wanted to show the uh actual page where we now have all of our smart guides. It's updated every week because every week we have a new live or we have a new smart guide to create. What you can find here is going to this page. Whether you're a a uh academy member,

26:18 Macquisper Academy member, or you're also a part of the YouTube membership and the higher tiers, you can come in here and actually search for any smart guide that you're looking for. So, if you're looking for a smart guide in productivity, you hit that. It brings you all the productivity smart guides. Matter of just here, oh, Siri commands. That's what I was looking for. Grab your copy here. Boom. Smart cut. So, what I want to share with uh what I want to share with our members is there are four different levels to our YouTube membership. The 99 cent level and the $4.99 level are basic levels that essentially give you the live broadcasts that we have here and allow me to call you out during videos or in chat. I see

27:04 your messages higher than I see other people. But the $10 level will post the smart guide in the uh channel community area so that even if you miss this live broadcast, you can easily get the smart guide. But if you're on our highest level, our Mac maximum level, that unlocks all of the rewards and perks that we've got, including complete access to the smart guide library. So, if you are not a member of the Mac Whisperer Academy, which we'll discuss a little bit later in this call, and you are a member of the YouTube membership and you love our smart guides, that higher level is the only one that has access to all of them. And we got a lot in the works. There's a lot of them coming. We're getting ready for OS 26.

27:51 We're updating as many of them as we can to make sure that as soon as we get to uh September, we've got guides that will help you know how to do the new features and functions of the latest operating system. So, if you are a member at a lower level and you want access to the full smart guides, you can upgrade to the $20 level. If you are at the $10 level, we'll post the smart guide in the community area. And for the people on the 99 cent and 4.99 level, you'll have to grab it from the QR code when Frank shares it in a few minutes here. I think that's uh that's the gist of that. Yeah, team's really excited to finally have the uh page together with all the smart guides and as we talked about, it's going to be growing every week. So,

28:36 great new addition. Awesome. Take off the membership. Go back to the uh horizontal. Uh yeah, let's go to let's go to vertical. Yeah, just so that we can use it. I appreciate that. Yeah, they did such a great job making it. It would suck if I didn't use it, right? Okay, so here we are in the vertical version. There's really nothing different other than the fact that it's vertical. Um everything's still laid out. It just takes a different use of the space itself. Here we are in our starting page where we've got our library up at the top and collections down at the bottom. What in the world is a collection? Okay, so when we organize photos, we organize

29:23 them in multiple different ways. And uh those of us that are OCD and anal have been organizing them into albums and folders for years or in my case decades. I had a I had one of the first digital cameras. I think it was like 2002, 2003. Um, so I've got like I've got digital pictures from forever ago. Uh, what a collection is is it's one of these different methods of organizing your photos. So, in order to explore our collections, I'm going to swipe up this way to bring up the collections view. Just like that. Now, the important thing about the collections view, it's brand new for iOS and iPad OS 18, and it threw a lot of people off because they were used to a different way of doing things. They were used to seeing something

30:09 different when they turned on their photos. They were used to finding things differently, and in a lot of cases, nobody was organizing into albums and photos. So, to be presented with these collections really felt like unnecessary for them. It was super necessary. These collections break things down into several different areas. And let's Hold on. Apologize on that. Get that one off of there. My 18-year-old son would not appreciate that picture showing up on YouTube. Shh. Nobody tell him. We got rid of it. It's done. Um, okay. So, it breaks it down to separate sections. Up at the top, we've got a section called recent days or one called people and pets or memories. And as we go down, you're going to see others, but I'm not going to call them

30:56 all out. I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom where there's a section called customize and reorder. And this is the gold of this section. By clicking that customize and reorder, you can either turn on or off collections that you like or don't like, and you can reorganize them. Some collections are full width, so you'll notice like recent days and featured photos go all the way across the screen here. Well, some collections are half width, like memories and albums. What you can do very easily is reorganize things. So, I might want shared albums and albums to be next to each other. And I can I should be able to move that over. It's not going to let me because it's fighting me for no good reason. Come on, move me over.

31:42 Anyways, because I'm in the vertical view, there's fewer options of the way we want to organize it. But you can move things around in all sorts of ways. And if there's one of these collections you don't need, like, hey, I don't really care about trips. I don't really care about recent days. I really don't care about memories. You can easily turn those off. You can also, as I said, move things around into different sections to make it look exactly the way you want it to look. Now, as far as I'm concerned, the most important collection is this one on the right called pinned collections. And the reason is each of these separate ones are their own collections with their own functionality. This one is where all of the collections come into one place. So

32:29 you can create a super simple set of your favorite albums, people, locations, or media types all within the pin collection section. So you can reorganize and turn on or off any of these. For this, I'm just going to turn them all back on. And I'm going to click the X in the upper right hand corner. Now, I want to talk for just a moment about a couple of these. Starting with the utilities. The utilities section. Oh, get that red thing off there. The utility section is super valuable. Utilities shows your favorite pictures, any pictures you've hidden. It can help you locate duplicates or receipts. It can help you find things that have handwriting or illustrations. It can show you the map or documents, recently shared uh photos and videos, recently saved ones, which is similar to the

33:14 other view. If you're hunting around for where that picture that my friend texted me, that's an older picture, where'd it go? Check recently saved. Utilities makes that super easy and super helpful to do. Coming down further, we've got people and pets, which is hands down my favorite collection because I love the way I love the way it organizes things and makes it simple for me to find pictures of almost anyone quickly. In all of these collections, if you tap on the title, you're going to get a full screen version of that specific collection, bringing me into people and pets, where I can click on anyone I like. Coming here to find my friend Mike, and it will show all the pictures I've got of that particular person in my photo library. You can see photos. You

34:01 can also see movies by switching between these two settings here. the movies will play a little slideshow of these pictures for that particular person. In the lower right hand corner, you've got this button here. Pressing that button will give you the option of seeing a summary of pictures or a 100% of the pictures you've got with that person. So, the people and pets section is super helpful, but it's not the only one. We're just going to keep rolling here for a moment. The media type section is also really important because it makes it easy for you to jump to a certain kind of photo. You want to see all of your selfies? Boom. There are all of your selfies. You want to see all of your screenshots? There are all of your screenshots. No hunting, no fighting. Here are all of my panoramas, making it

34:48 easy for me to see any kind of picture quickly. And down below that, we've got wallpaper selections, suggestions, which give you ideas of new ways to create a fun lock screen or information about recent trips you've taken, like the one I took last weekend to San Diego. Down below, you've got featured photos, memories, and recent days. Play around with all of them. Figure out what you like and what you don't like, and what you work with and what you don't work with. But the two key ones are the album section, which for me is in a weird place over here. The album section, which shows you all of your existing albums and folders. Briefly, when you are organizing your photos, albums are a great way to organize clumps of photos,

35:34 but folders are a great way to organize clumps of albums. For example, if you take a bunch of pictures during Halloween, rather than having one album with 40 years of Halloween pictures, most people tend to be Halloween 2024, Halloween 2023, Halloween 2022. And by using folders, you can put those albums together. I've done it in a folder called holidays and events where you'll see all sorts of folders organizing specific holidays and events like Halloween. breaking it down so I can jump into that year I was uh dressed up as Beetlejuice and my son was dressed up as Jack Skellington. Easy for us to do from this collection, the albums collection, you can also organize and

36:20 create folders yourself by clicking on the create button in the upper right hand corner here. There you can create a new album or a new folder and you can drag and drop things into those albums or into those folders. I'm going to take a quick side step back into our photos library here to show you a way that you can organize things into albums quickly. Now, we all know you can click the select button. You can tap on things. You're more than welcome to do that. Sometimes that's the easiest way to do it. But you can also press and hold on an item. I should do that differently. You can also press and hold on an item. And while you're holding it, you'll see I've got it moving here. I've grabbed it. I can use my other finger and my other hand to grab additional pictures right into there. Then what I can do is I can click on the uh sidebar on the

37:08 left side here, go directly into albums and either drag it into a specific album here that I want to see or create a new album and drag it right into that new album just like this. making it super super simple for you to quickly and easily build albums and folders. Okay, get out of that for a second. Out of there fully out of there. All right, last piece and then I'm going to pause, take a moment, share something else with you guys. The other piece of the collections that is really powerful is this pinned collection section. Now, Frank, I'm going to have you go horizontal for me because I kind of need it in a different

37:54 view. Ready for that? Okay. Now, first thing I'm going to do is customize and reorder these things because the pin collections to me is the most important thing and I want it front and center. I couldn't do that in the vertical view, but I can do that easily here. The pin collection is a place that you can customize any specific thing that you want to have go there. It looks like Did this rotate properly, Frank? Let me just do it again. It looks stretched. It was stretched for some reason. Still Yeah, I got it. I got it. Yeah, it's okay. It's It's It's Julie's stretch marks. Don't tell her I said that. Um, okay. So, the pin collection, if I click on the header where it says pin collections, it's going to show me all of the pin collections I've created so

38:40 far. If I click on the modify button to the right, it's going to allow me to control this. By looking at the top section, we see what pin collections have already been activated. You seeing my screen share? Doesn't look like I'm seeing it there. I'm going to I'm going to reset this screen share, Frank. Yeah, I could see it. But whatever you need to Something something looked funny there. Let's just clean it up. It was just the copy was stretched. That looks good. Okay. Yeah, that looks better. All right. So, I'm going to take a back step. If you click on the pinned collections to the right where it says modify, that will allow you to adjust it. At the top, you'll see what pinned collections you already have. At the bottom, you have suggestions, but at the

39:26 very bottom is the power tip for you guys. This blue button allows you to pick any section of your photo library. So, I can come in here and I can pick a specific album that I want to have show up at the top there. Or I can come down here and I can pick a particular person I want to have show up. Or I can come in here and I can find a particular kind of photos. Like I'd like easy access to my receipts. Then in this top section, by using the bar on the right, you can reorganize those things to move them into the right position. I'm going to put my daughter right next to favorites. And I'm going to put receipts right next to her. And I'm going to turn off videos. And I'm going to turn off selfies. And I'm going to turn off panoramas and slow-mo cuz I don't care.

40:13 But I am going to delete this documents and grab a different documents folder. If you wonder how I organize like my driver's license and passports and things like that and save them on my computer, I save them inside of an album. And the album that I save them inside of is called documents. And I believe it's under my personal thing right here. There's my documents right there. And so I'm going to take those docs and move them up as well. And now what we'll see right here, grab my annotator. What we'll see right here is all of those collections that we just set up in the order we set them up. Which means as soon as I open my photos library, if I want to see pictures of my daughter, I'm just one click away. As

40:58 soon as I open my photo library, if I need to see my screenshots, I'm one click away. And soon as I open my photo library, if I need to show one of my governmentissued documents, I can click right here and they'll show up right there, making it super easy for me to show my driver's license or passport or whatever needs to be done. The pin collection is the big big big piece that nobody is setting up right and it makes all the difference. All right, Frank, that's where I am for this piece. I've got I've got a little more we'll come back to, but let's go ahead and uh All right, Frank. All right, Frank, why don't we talk about the uh academy

41:44 since we uh kind of a little while ago. Let's bring up uh ways in which to do that. Boom. All right. Uh I'll be real quick on this because there's I'd like to answer some of the questions and there's something else I'd like to show you guys before we're done. Very simply, every person, client, customer that I've worked with over the last 20 to 25 years has the same questions. They have the same problems and they have the same issues. Maybe they're disorganized and don't know how to find what they're looking for. Maybe they're overwhelmed by new upgrades and new features. Maybe they've got an old device and they want to upgrade, but they're not really sure what the benefit is or how to use a new device and

42:31 they're a little afraid of that. For 25 years, I have been taking care of those clients one-on-one. But at the beginning of the pandemic, I created a classroom environment called the Mac Whisper Academy that gives me the ability to take uh a larger number of people and walk them through these tools together. It's like what you get by watching a YouTube video except in real time where you can ask questions, where we can see each other's faces, and where it's more of a personal interaction. So, if you love what you're seeing today and you got a huge amount of value in this video, this is like I don't know, not even the tip of the ice cube on top of the tip of the iceberg of what we do in the Mac Whisperer Academy. The Mac Whisper Academy is a $100 a month for the

43:17 standard uh the standard subscription. It gives you two live twohour classes every month. two live one-hour question and a question and answer sessions every month where you can ask any technological question or kind of any personal question. Sometimes it's not even technological uh but you can ask anything that you want to know and get your questions answered easily and simply. In addition to that, my uh academy students get a discount on my one-on-one time and have access to the entire Smart Guide library amongst other things. Our next class is on Saturday. I think it's I think we're still cleaning up the iPhone on Saturday. Am I right on that, Frank? Pretty sure. Yeah. So, on

44:03 Saturday, we're taking the next step in organizing and decluttering your iPhone so you can find what you're looking for quickly and get around without getting stuck swiping through pages and hunting and searching for everything. If you're interested in checking it out, you can hit this QR code for a 30-day free um 30-day free account that allows you to come in and check out what we're doing in July and in August. If you're really nice and you're really curious and you don't want to hit that QR code, email Frank. He tends to let a couple of people in as guests and you will get the full Mac Whisperer experience and understand why over a hundred people have chosen to learn their technology the Mac Whisper way through our academy.

44:51 And uh I'd love to see any of you here. If there's there are members that are in this chat, I'm sure they'll talk a little bit about uh what they've gotten out of the academy and why it's valuable to them. But if you're new and you're just stumbling across this video, Frank atthemackwisper.com is a teddy bear sweetheart who will absolutely just let you walk right into my class without even filling out forms. Frank, give me more emails. You guys keep me busy, which is great. Questions, things that we don't get to today, something that occurs to you, please reach out. those the those of you that heard back from me and all of you have um Dylan and I sometimes stay up late at night, answer questions, get everything out to you. So, please use that email, don't hesitate, reach out. Love to hear from

45:37 you. So, I want to take a moment to cover one other simple thing, give you a little piece of it that I think is important. I'm going to try and make it about five minutes and give us time for questions because I see that there's a bunch of them and I want to make sure we answer as many as we can. Otherwise, Frank's going to be busy until three in the morning tonight answering those questions for you. Um, so we've got the screen shared. In this situation, I'm gonna come back to our library by tugging down. Uh, I'm going to go back to the square view because I kind of like it a little bit better for my library. Clicking the sort button here, clicking the view options, and going to the square photo grid. See how it kind of fills in the space a little bit better. And I want to talk about editing

46:23 photos. When you take a photo with your phone or with your iPad, you have a lot of options in editing on your phone, your iPad, and your computer that, in my opinion, replace the need for Photoshop for like 98% of people. So, if you're still paying that ridiculous $40 a month subscription so that you can clean up or edit a photo, if you're great at it and you love Photoshop, I'm not going to get in your way, but um I'd rather do it here. I'd rather use the tools that Apple gave us. I'm going to go ahead and open up this cute picture that we've got right here. We're going to click on the settings button. Oh, where's my annotator? Where'd my annotator go? Decided it was not going to show up. You guys are just going to have to deal without the annotator for a moment. Let me see if I can find it.

47:10 Oh, I got it. I found it. Success. Um, we're going to click on this settings button right here. Although it seems like a settings icon, which I personally think was a mistake on their part, it's actually the edit button. And so when you come into this section, and now I need to get rid of my annotator. What is my annotator doing? It's like hiding somewhere. Oh, I see. Was hiding on the other screen. All right, that doesn't help at all. Let's clean that up here. When I click on that settings button, I'm going to get a ton of different options. Now, be aware if your iPad is vertical versus horizontal, the buttons will be in a different place because there's more space. On the horizontal, they're on the left and right. On the vertical, they're generally on the top and bottom. On the left side, you'll see

47:57 options like adjusting the style or adjusting the portrait picture. Now, this happens to be a portrait picture, which is one of those great pictures that allows you to blur the background. And frankly, the tree behind this woman is a little bit distracting for me. So, I'm going to start coming up to the top here. We're going to click on the focal length, which is that button there. It's already clicked in this case. And on the right side, you're going to notice the depth controls, allowing me to just slightly turn them on and blur out. Unfortunately, it blurred her out, too. We'll find the difference there. And it blurs out the trees in the background, making that just a better and more fun picture. In addition to being able to do portrait edits, if you took it as a live photo, you can also do live edits. Live

48:44 edits allow you to find a specific frame. Now, in this case, this one's not moving. Let's go find one that's moving a little better. And uh the good news is I took tons of pictures on this trip, so I got tons of pictures to show you guys. There's a specific one I'm thinking about, which I believe is this one right here. Okay, I'm going to go ahead back to our settings. I'm gonna Did you not want to let me do the live photo? Is this not a live photo? Might not be a live photo. Let's find one that is. There's one. Okay. So, I'm going to come in, click the settings button here, and I should be able to click the live button on the left, which will allow me to find the proper picture where the dog is not in the frame and the kids are properly lifted up. And when you find

49:31 that picture, tap on it and click make key photo. With live photos, you can adjust it after the picture, which is phenomenal when you're dealing with group photos because somebody's always blinking or or moving or doing something. So, when we came together for our group picture right here, you'll see that the dog decided I was his target. Um, and by coming into the live image here, I can move that just slightly so that it's not in my face and I'm laughing back here instead. make it the key photo and it's automatically a better picture. In addition to that, clicking the adjust button will give you a ton of tools to either automatically adjust, adjust the color, turn things black and white, and you can also use

50:18 filters on all of these separate things. But one of the pieces that's newest and worth talking about is the cleanup function. And the cleanup function is not going to remove that dog, unfortunately. Uh, but let us see if we can get the cleanup function to do. All right, perfect example. The dog ended up behind Julie and I. That dog photobombed every single picture. It was ridiculous. Every time it's in every picture. So, let's see if we can remove it with AI. I'm going to click the settings button. I'm going to click the cleanup button. It usually takes a moment. the first time you you're doing it. So, I'm going to let it take that moment and download

51:03 the cleanup tool. Remember that to use cleanup, you have to have an iPad capable of Apple intelligence, and Apple intelligence has to be active on that iPad. All right, looks like it's just about ready for me. Wait for it to finish its thing. Would you feel the same way if it was a cat? Probably not. Pro this this dog was huge. This was not a dog. This was a horse. That's a goodiz dog. So, what I should be able to do is circle that and AI should be able to go in. Oh, did not do a great job of it. Unfortunately, sometimes it does better than others. Let's try it again. Make sure it knows I want the whole thing

51:48 gone, not just the tail of it. Let's get all of that out of here and let it blur itself away. And poof, no more dog. Nice. Better picture. I didn't have to retake it. I'm going to click the done button. So, I just wanted to show you guys there's there's more than we have time to talk about when it comes to editing photos. Um, I've done a couple of YouTube videos and a couple of lives about photo editing. If you guys want more of them, let me know. Pop it into the community posts on YouTube. Let me know what you want for our next live uh video, our next live class, because you guys dictate where we go with what we do on our Thursday uh lives. Frank, I think that's what I wanted to get into. And it's a fun picture. I think um you know, I I'm going to crop

52:36 it when I get back back into it because I'm going to crop it right now. Actually, I'm crop it right now because the person who set it up did not do it in a very good way. Um, I'm going to change it into a horizontal picture. Just like that. And I just zoom in a little bit like that. And click done. This is what I really wanted to show you in these couple of minutes. You can instantaneously make your pictures better. With just a couple of steps and a couple of editing tools and no need to pay Adobe a nickel. Uh, last last thing I'll say is don't forget if you ever make changes to a photo and decide after the fact that you don't like those changes, I'm going to first

53:22 duplicate this one here. If you make changes and decide you don't like those changes, you can always click the revert to original button for it to go right back even, and this is amazing, years later. So, there's no problem with worrying that you accidentally screwed up that picture. You can always go back and undo it. Uh, that's that's my lesson. I'm going to take some questions. Before we do, Frank, let's give our friends a smart guide. Yeah. You know, want to take questions first? Let's You give them a smart guide. Let's do it. That was a great lesson. Yeah. I thought it was pretty good. I liked what we talked about. I know there's a handful of a handful of questions, so I want to make sure we have time for those. But let's uh let's pull up that smart guide code.

54:07 We go got the QR for everybody. There's a URL they can use as well. But another beauty coming hot off the presses of our team. Smart guy to be shared, downloaded. Our gift to you makes everything real simple. nice overview of what we covered today and probably more. That's for everybody. I'll put the uh URL in the U chat. Fantastic. Let's get to um Yeah, I'll do that. I'll put it in the chat and let's get the questions to you. Um it looks like uh Neil had either looks like Neil either is leaving or had

54:53 to leave. Let's grab his questions first so I can just get those handled. Yeah, I'm scanning a lot of printed photos, importing them into the photo album. He's noticing that the images are not being incorporated into his people folder. So the people section is automatic, but it's a little bit slow. So when pictures come in, it doesn't automatically grab them. On the computer, it's very easy for you to point to specific people and properly identify them. on the iPad and the phone, you kind of have to wait for the system to do it, and it's imperfect. I was looking today for an easy way to go into a picture and identify someone in the picture. In some cases, you can do that. I was not able to find a way to

55:38 do it on this version of the iPad. It may exist on OS 26, but Neil, if you don't have a computer, it's just going to be clunky. If you do have a computer, there's a YouTube video that talks specifically about the people and pets section and how to customize it. I believe it's uh I believe it's uh how to get organized with photos too if I remember correctly. There's a couple of them in there. Again, if you don't have it, unfortunately, the iPad has limitations and the people and pets uh recognition function is one of them. You just have to rely on it to eventually find its way in. But we can force it in on the computer pretty easily. Great. Uh, might as well bring another one up for Neil. I don't know if you mentioned

56:23 it earlier, Dylan. Part of the benefits of being a YouTube member is that the people that are members, we get a little icon, right? And we we we try to do our best to get to them first and answer everybody's questions just as we're Yeah, I think that's a good that's a good thing to call out. So, if you're looking in the chat and you see anybody with a little apple to the right of their name, those are YouTube members. If you'd like to become a YouTube member, uh even at the $1 or $5 level, you get access to these lives. But I love my members. I love this YouTube community. And uh it's they're not just names on a screen to me. I've had real conversations with Neil and with John and with Manny and with many, many, many of the people, Joselyn, uh Rey, that show up on these calls. Even Marie and I have had those conversations. So being a

57:10 part of the YouTube membership is the first step to really connecting with me on a better level. All right, let's see. His question says, "After printed photos are scanned, I have new metadata that I inserted via the scanner, but the main metadata states the date as the day I scan them. Is there an easy way to change the year?" Yes, there is. And let's go ahead and um we should be able to do it right from here. All right, go ahead and grab your screen. I'm in this picture. The thing about metadata and metadata is invisible information that is contained behind the photo. It's like when your grandmother used to write on the back like this is Uncle Jimmy at the fair in 1935. That information is what digital

57:56 pictures call metadata. When it was taken, the camera that was used, where it was taken, etc. When you scan pictures, the scan date is the metadata date. And so it's going to get brought in at the wrong date. And it's easy to change that by opening up the picture, coming into the three dots, and you should see the adjust date and time section right there. Change it to whatever day you want. I am unsure if you can do that with multiple pictures. So I'm going to find out and select a bunch of them here. Click our three dots. Uh yes, you can select multiple pictures and adjust the date and time very, very easily. You can also use that same functionality to adjust the location. And if you haven't started using locations for your photos, you're

58:41 missing out, especially on scanned ones because it makes it so easy for you to jump directly into, and let's go into our utilities here. And we'll go into the map. Jump directly into pictures that were taken anywhere in the world. So, when I want to find my Hawaii pictures, which are somewhere over here, I can scroll in. And right there, the closer I scroll, the more detailed it gets all the way down to street level, showing me exactly where a picture was taken. So, Neil, not only can you adjust the date and time, but you can also adjust the location, and all of that can be done from the iPad as well as the computer or phone. Beautiful. But what's next?

59:27 Uh, Mojo. Best way to keep photos, backgrounds, text, images, icons, et, etc. separate albums. The best way to do it is to make sure you've got albums and you put things into albums. The mistake that everybody has been making is they just leave everything in their library and then their library has all of these separate pieces to it. Now, you can help with that by coming into the sort button and filtering on or off certain things or hiding or showing screenshots, which for me is like I've got so many screenshots I don't need them in here. And you can make those kind of basic adjustments. But when you're really wanting to get organized, the key is put things in

1:00:12 albums. Once you do put things in albums, you can easily come in here, go into the filter, and show things that are not in an album, which will mean if you haven't put it away yet, you'll see it in this category. That means the things like the background pictures and the desktop things and the screenshots that you don't want to see can be not seen because they're in an album. And it can also allow you to go to specific albums. Now, I'll just show you for me and uh we'll do it from guess I'm going to do it my mistake. I'm going to do it from the collections view instead of from the sidebar because I just think it's a little easier to see. I'm going to tap in my album section and I'm going to show you that inside of my album section, I have several folders that I've used to organize things. Now,

1:00:59 one of the things I do a lot of is I show examples to my Mac Whisper Academy students. That is my TMA folder. And so rather than having those examples floating everywhere, I've sorted them and put them in here where I can find wallpapers that I share with people, where I can find videos that I'm using for YouTube. It's very funny that family that we saw pictures of. This is that same family two years earlier. That's a funny uh coincidence. Probably not a coincidence. Um, I've even got, you know, specific stickers that I like to create, uh, images from or wallpapers that I want for backgrounds. And so, Mojo, that to me is the best and easiest way to manage it. Now, I believe Mojo was the one who also asked, is there a way to have your photo library open with

1:01:46 a specific album instead of the mess? And the short answer is not on this operating system. But if you put your pinned collections here and you just ignore the mess, you can jump right to whatever album you want with one click. So it's not like you're lost and there's no way to do it and it's so hard and I I can't possibly see my screenshots quickly. If you use pin collections and keep it right here, you can get to it instantly. And furthermore, if you start to organize these pictures rather than just letting all your screenshots and all your everything be lost in here, you can organize your screenshots and filter things or turn off screenshots and other things. That mess will become less of a mess. The problem is if nobody organizes

1:02:35 their pictures, you're never going to have it not be a mess. I spend a lot of time organizing my pictures so I can find them easily and quickly by person, by place, by date, by category, by holiday. I am regularly putting things away. And Mojo, my recommendation for you is embrace organization because searching is great, but finding is better. And I can easily come in and just as an example come into my family and pull up pictures of me with my dad and my mom just like instantly in a matter of seconds things are organized. They're put away into separate albums and it's never something I have to hunt for. Want to see my new granddaughter? That's my new granddaughter right here and my daughter in the upper right hand

1:03:22 corner. I did not have to hunt for those pictures. It was not hard for me to find them because I put them away. It's excellent. All right, running after time. I don't know if you want to take one or two more questions. I I I want to say to Nancy Cersi, welcome. Glad to have you as a member. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being on this journey with us. Uh Frank, let's take one more question if you've got a good one there and we'll wrap on that. Bill had a couple of good ones. Bill Leman, um this one's interesting. He's asking if you can have mult multiple photo libraries or is he only able to break them up in collections? So, anytime somebody asks me is it possible,

1:04:07 the answer is always yes. It's just not convenient. You can and and on the iPad you can't. On the computer, you can have multiple libraries. But on the iPad, if you use that iCloud shared library, it gives you you two libraries, and you can use it and not share it with somebody else. And then you can have an alternate library, and you can be like, "Here's my work library, and here's my personal library." But you're not going to be able to create multiple libraries on an

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