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Tag: Apple Photos

Quickly Assess Photos Using Star Ratings

Photos Workbench seamlessly integrates with Apple Photos, providing powerful tools to help you organize, name, and compare your photos. The star rating system is one of the most effective tools in this suite.

The Importance of Star Ratings

Star ratings are invaluable for organizing and culling your photos and videos. They help you identify your best shots and classify images by relative quality or relevance, with ratings ranging from 1 star (worst) to 5 stars (best).

By rating your photos, you can streamline your library by removing the poor shots. This process makes deciding which pictures to share, publish, or print easier. Once your photos are classified, finding specific images becomes a breeze. Browsing your library to rekindle memories is also much more enjoyable when you can focus on the ★★★★ and ★★★★★ images.

Making the Process Enjoyable

While rating photos is an excellent opportunity to revisit memories, it can also be tedious work.

Assuming a 5-star rating is reserved for your best shots—those worthy of National Geographic—it should be relatively easy to identify them at first sight.

That would leave the 4-star rating for the best shots in the current album. However, determining the best photos without constantly comparing them can be challenging. The same holds for the 3-star rating for the best shots in a series of similar photos.

Assigning a rating can feel arbitrary. Would you give the same photo the same rating if you rechecked it the next day?

A structured workflow can simplify the process of assessing the relative quality of your photos.

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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?

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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

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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.

Summer: Time to Travel Reminisce

Summer is here. Summer holidays are just around the corner. This is the time of year when many of us usually plan to travel and explore the world. Not so this year.

Explore. Reminisce. Show

This year we can reminisce about past travels and adventures. This summer we can dig into our well-organized photo collections. Photos organized by location now allow us to virtually jump around the globe and through time. We can explore photos in Google Earth to feel teleported to places we had the luck to visit. With photos pinned to precise map locations, we can retrace our steps in Google Maps. Nothing refreshes the memory like photos combined with the aerial views that reveal how the individual pictures connect.

Photos on Google Maps
Photos on Google Maps: Visit to Taj Mahal

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HoudahGeo 6.0 Video Tutorial

Todd Olthoff of ScreenCastsOnline takes you on a tour of HoudahGeo 6.

HoudahGeo 6 is an application packed with features to help geocode and add metadata to your photos. With its simple steps of Load, Process, and Output; with all of the features packed in each of these steps HoudahGeo is the application that could start your entire photo workflow and it is the first application that launches when I load my photos to make sure I have all of the metadata embedded in the images themselves so that that data will follow the photo into any photo management application I choose to use.

Todd walks you through the various ways to get photos into HoudahGeo and then covers all of the steps from geocoding, over exporting metadata, to sharing and publishing. Todd does an excellent job describing the many features and finer details. We recommend all HoudahGeo users watch this tutorial.

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ScreenCastsOnline: HoudahGeo Video Tutorial

Todd Olthoff of ScreenCastsOnline takes you on a tour of HoudahGeo 5.

HoudahGeo is an application that streamlines adding location and other metadata to your files. The best part is that it writes that information to the files themselves instead of the library’s catalog.

Todd walks you through the various ways to get photos into HoudahGeo and then covers all of the geocoding and metadata options. You also will learn how to add metadata to the files and share them with outside libraries. Exporting that added information to other services that read them is covered in the last section of the show.

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