Clicky

Find Photos by Star Rating

Photos Workbench helps you easily rate, find, and cull your photos and videos, making your Apple Photos library more organized and manageable.

Rate Your Photos with Ease

Photos Workbench allows you to rate your photos and videos on a scale from 1 to 5 stars. While the exact meaning of each rating is up to personal preference, here is one suggested interpretation:

  • No star – Unrated. Still needs reviewing
  • ★ (1 Star) – Rejected. Marked for deletion
  • ★★ (2 Stars) – Keep without adjustments. May have emotional value
  • ★★★ (3 stars) – Okay. Invest time into adjustments
  • ★★★★ (4 stars) – Good. Worth sharing
  • ★★★★★ (5 Stars) – Fantastic. Worth printing

Regardless of how you choose to use the star ratings, the better photos always get the higher rating. Thus, Photos Workbench offers filters allowing you to see items above a particular rating. For example, to see the standout shots of a given album, you can filter to show items rated “★★★★ or better.”

Filter Photos by Star Rating: 4-Star or Better
Filter Photos by Star Rating: 4-Star or Better

What if you wanted to see only photos with a specific rating?

Continue reading Find Photos by Star Rating

Filter Photos by Keywords

In Photos Workbench, keyword palettes and keyboard shortcuts make it particularly easy to assign keywords to your photos. Photos Workbench can filter albums by keywords, allowing you to find or focus on a specific set of images.

Along with albums, keywords help you organize your images. Typically, albums group photos by event. Keywords are labels that describe the subject of a photo or properties of the photo. Examples: “Family”, “Landscape”, …, “Still-Life”, “Action”, …

Keywords can also be used to flag images you intend to work with or export. For instance, you can assign the keyword “Share” to all the photos you plan to add to the family’s shared album.

Favorite Keywords Palette
Favorite Keywords: Organize your pictures and flag those that you intend to share

Continue reading Filter Photos by Keywords

Find and Fix PDF Files That Lack Searchable Text

Archiving paper documents as PDF files is a great way to save shelf space and preserve essential records.

However, more than simply scanning the documents is required. It would be best if you also used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to process the scans. Once OCR has processed a PDF scan, the file contains an invisible text version in addition to the scanned image of the document. macOS Spotlight can now index the content, and you can use HoudahSpot to search your document archive.

But what if some of your PDF files lack OCR text?

Continue reading Find and Fix PDF Files That Lack Searchable Text

Video Tour of Photos Workbench

This 5-minute guided tour of Photos Workbench rushes you past all the landmarks and leaves you wanting. The tour guide encourages you to download Photos Workbench to satisfy your curiosity.

Continue reading Video Tour of Photos Workbench

Batch Change Photo Titles using Photos Workbench

In Apple Photos, titles can hint at what is in a picture or where and when you took it. Descriptive titles are one of the resources we can use to organize and find photos.

Photos Workbench offers several methods of adding descriptive titles to photos:

  • Find & Replace Text: Change existing titles
  • Name Format: Build titles from text and tokens

Custom names can include a date and counter. The counter numbers the photos in their current order. Sort photos by date or arrange them manually to number the images by topic or order of preference.

Let’s see Photos Workbench in action.

Add Locations to Photos Using Photos Workbench

Photos Workbench offers several methods of adding locations to photos:

    • Drag-and-drop photos on a large map
    • Automatic geocoding use a track log from a GPS device or iPhone app
    • Incremental geocoding places photos along the path you traveled

Location information will allow Apple Photos to show your images on a map. It will help you look up images that you did not otherwise file or tag.

Knowing – and showing – where you took a photo adds to its “story”. On the map in Photos and Photos Workbench you get a bird’s-eye view of where you took your photos and the route you took to get there.

Let’s see Photos Workbench in action.

Introducing: Photos Workbench

Photos Workbench is a companion to Apple Photos on macOS. It helps you organize, name, and compare your photos.

Photos Workbench: Batch Rename Photos

Continue reading Introducing: Photos Workbench

What’s New in Tembo 3.0?

macOS 11 and 12 have introduced a dramatic new look representing a significant aesthetic departure from previous macOS versions. Tembo 3.0 adopts this refreshed Mac user interface with a fine-tuned new look, a new icon, and a redesigned toolbar. 

Moreover, Tembo 3 adds support for Macs with Apple Silicon processors. It gives you the best performance on the latest Mac hardware.

Apple Mail Plug-in

Tembo 3.0 can again search Apple Mail messages.

Starting with macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple Mail messages are no longer available through the Spotlight index used by Tembo .

Tembo 3.0 can nonetheless find your Apple Mail messages. Tembo installs a plug-in that runs within the Mail application. This plug-in allows Tembo to include Mail message files in your search results.

Enhanced Grid View

In Grid view, you can turn on additional file information which will display information like an image’s size, f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, and other metadata directly below the file name.

File Tags

Your favorite file tags are now available from the context menu. Customizable keyboard shortcuts allow for quick tagging.

Further Enhancements

  • Search By Date: Tembo 3.0 adds new options to search for files by time frame
  • Options: New options menu to quickly adjust your search parameters. Set default options in Tembo preferences
  • Apple Silicon: Tembo 3.0 works with the latest versions of macOS and fully supports Apple Silicon Macs

 

Non-Recursive Search: Find Top-Level Files Only

HoudahSpot searches “recursively” descend into subfolders: results will include files from the folder where you are searching as well as files from folders nested within that folder.

In HoudahSpot you can list folders where you want to search. You can also exclude folders (and their subfolders) from the search: just drag the folder from the breadcrumb path at the bottom of the HoudahSpot window to the Locations/Exclude list.

In most cases, you want search results to include nested items. You have organized your files in a folder hierarchy and are using a search tool to find files anywhere in a folder tree of related files.

Sometimes you want to see only results from the top-level folder. You can repeat the above procedure to exclude more folders. Excluding all subfolders, one by one would be tedious. We will use a filter instead. Continue reading Non-Recursive Search: Find Top-Level Files Only

HoudahGeo 6: A New Way of Lining Up Photos with a GPS Track

Automatic geocoding in HoudahGeo matches photos to a GPS track log. A track log is a record of where you have been. A GPS app or track logger records your current position and the current time. It does so every few seconds and thus creates a breadcrumb trail of your travels.

HoudahGeo figures out where you took a photo by matching the timestamp on the photo with the times in the GPS track log. While the GPS device gets accurate time information from satellites, your camera clock is probably not accurate. Most cameras also do not record time zone information: the photo coming out of the camera may say it was taken at 12 PM, but there is no telling if that is to be understood as 12 PM east coast or west coast – a 3-hour difference.

Timestamps in HoudahGeo

HoudahGeo needs to know the exact time a photo was taken. That is why HoudahGeo asks about camera clock settings when you import images.

There are 4 ways you can tell HoudahGeo about your camera clock settings. The first 3 are found in the Load > Camera Setup… panel. This panel pops up automatically when you import photos that lack time zone information.

You can skip Camera Setup… – accept the current settings – and proceed to import more images and GPS track logs. We will correct the camera clock settings later by matching a key photo to a spot on the track log. Continue reading HoudahGeo 6: A New Way of Lining Up Photos with a GPS Track