Final Thoughts on Photo Management

Welcome back to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by Mr. Steven Robus. Hello, Steven. How are you today? I'm doing great, David. How you doing? Excellent. Today we are going to take on a topic near and dear to all Mac users, photo management. You think we could make it any sexier than that? I feel like I'll have to sh workshop the uh the title, but I mean photos is something I mean everyone has to deal with. Yeah. And it is kind of complicated now with iCloud Storage, multiple photo services. And then what you do with those photos afterwards, you know, everybody's got different systems and backups. I'm excited for us to get to our backup section, David, because I have some good news for you you. I think may have to do it. Oh you do. That's good. That's good. I felt like the eye of Sauron just watching my backup situation. Well, I mean it is I mean and today we're not going to talk about shooting pictures. There's a whole that's really a whole nother show. And uh you know there's a lot of great waging take care uh advantage of the phone apps and different shooting techniques, but uh today we just want to talk about photo management because there really is a whole show in it with the way things have evolved. And um I'm really looking forward to kind of digging deep and getting nerdy about the ways to manage your photos. That's right. And I'm gonna shout out Aperture right now. I hope Apple brings it back one year. You know, I was at Aperture um I was at Mac world one year and um I was a I was an instructor that year. I was one of the the lecturers and I was in the speaker room, and there was a guy named Derek Story. I don't know if you know who he is, but he was a very popular kind of videographer, photographer who used to teach a lot of Mac stuff. And he was going to teach, I think, like a two -day seminar on aperture. And the first day of dubdub, I'm I'm sorry, not dubdub, the first day of Mac world, Derek comes in with this like grief-stricken look on his face. They had redone the entire app. I don't know if you remember when Aperture went from kind of good to like a something completely different to nothing. Yes. Well, the day it went to something different. He was supposed to teach he had two days worth of training and the app basically didn't exist anymore. He had to go. I just remember the look on that guy's face thinking, oh man, that's not gonna be fun. That would be heartbreaking. Oh my god. Yeah. It's like, okay, everybody, let's just open up this new app and figure it out together. Yeah, communal learning. Yeah. But uh I'll I'll talk a little bit more about because we're gonna get into our history a little bit. But I still have a lot of nostalgia for it, and I don't know if I still I have a great replacement for it still today. I use PixelMater Pro. Now it's part of Creator Studio. It's an Apple app and it's very good, but it's still not aperture or even a Lightroom alternative, I think that photographer I think photographers would agree. Yeah. I mean Aperture scratched a unique itch at the time. Yeah. So how far back does yours go, David? Yeah, let's talk about a little bit about photo history before we start talking about it. Um I actually because of this show, I went back and looked and found the first picture I ever took with a digital photographer, uh, digital camera. And um uh it's a picture of my wife and my little girl at the time. She's one year old and uh or less than one. Now she's a grown-up high school teacher, just to give you some perspective. And my wife is so pretty. I'm so lucky. And I just uh that's the first picture I ever took with a digital photograph. Also of note that that cabinet behind it, I built that for my wife as a wedding gift because she likes to collect Disney watches. So boy, it really brought me back looking at that picture. We'll uh put it in the show notes so you can check it out. And so you think what camera was that on? Some sort of Sony. I remember the um the memory stick was like the size of a stick of gum. And uh I I just I don't remember what it was called or whatever,. Um but somehow I scraped some money together and bought a digital camera in 1997 and uh the resolution is 800 by 1184. I looked it up. That's things have changed. Things have changed drastic ally. Uh, I will share. I found some of my earliest photos. This was one of the first ones I took because I got a digital camera in December 2020 for Christmas. That was like my first personal digital camera. It was a Fuji film, 3.2 megapixel. And I thought I was very artsy uh when I received that camera. And so I went outside and put my trumpet in the snow because I was in New York at the time and I was like, I'm gonna take some mo ody photos of my trumpet. And so I used that Fujifilm for years. It was that that digital camera. And so I have my trumpet photo. Also put a couple photos uh that I have of uh my wife and I from college all taken with the same camera uh down in the show notes. But I loved it. You know, I didn't uh later in my career I actually did photography kind of professionally. I worked for a travel company and I used a Nikon D7000. And that's when I used Aperture. I was working for that travel company. That's how I manage the photos. And we use those in like brochures and things like that. And uh had an old Drobo to back up those photos. Do you ever have a Drobo? Oh yeah. They they used to be a sponsor of MacPower Users ages ago. Good guys. Yeah. It was it's a good solution at the time. It was, it was. And and I also used a lot of photography in website work. I would make a lot of websites uh early on in my career. And so my photo library, which we'll talk about cleaning our photo libraries later, there's a lot of random photos of just like random people. And I'd be like, oh right, I made a website for them, but their headshot is saved in my photo library. somewhere Along with a trumpet in the snow. I so I gotta ask, what's your mouthpiece in that trumpet picture? Oh, that's a Dennis Warwick. I think it's a 3B. I played on a a pretty different one. I had a box three C like everybody did. I had a five C, but but that was I think a Dennis Warwick. It was a gold mouthpiece with my box stratavarius trumpet, which my parents bought me in high school. And I I played on that for for many years. Many years. Nice, nice. So for non-musicians out there, uh horn players always have an obsession over their mouthpieces. And we always think if we just get the right mouthpiece, we're gonna sound better. And it's actually just practice that you need, you know. That is that is it. I'll also say, you know, I I took pictures with that Fuji camera for many years and uh a lot of these pictures like hold up. I have a picture of my dad here in New York City in front of his junior high sch ool, we'll put in the show notes and uh you know they look good. They're not super high resolution, but uh even me and my wife in college, they they stand up. They stand up. Yeah. Steven, there's something different about you in that high in that picture . I can't put my finger on it. I had uh I had slightly more hair on the head, but slightly less hair on the face. You know what I mean? Just it moves around over the years. Yeah. But you know, I grew up a photo nerd. I I used to go at church. We had like a dark room and I would go and develop black and white. Somewhere along the line I got you know, in the eighties it was an antiquated canon EOS or something with like , you know, a stock lens, and I would shoot black and white film on it. And I I used to really be into it as a kid. And uh so I I've got history with photography, but I totally got the idea of digital photos. I mean, my parents were funny because, you know, we didn't have a lot of money and when they died I went through all their stuff and it was very clear to me that they bought two rolls of film a year. They bought a a roll at Christmas that they shot and we'd have, you know, twelve or twenty-four pictures from Christmas uh of the ones that came out. You know, back then you'd take a picture, you'd never had no idea if it was any good. And then they'd get another role that they would shoot through the year. So there'd be like you'd get one picture on your birthday, you know, and that was it. You know, because there were four of us and they had to make sure everybody got their birthday picture. And you know, that's half your role right there. You know, that's it. And you know it's funny, I I remember when I was a k id, you know, going to JCPenney to take family photos was like a thing. And it's funny, now it's like a meme. Sometimes there'll be like young guys will go or or young friends and they'll do go to JCPenney for the fun photos. But like that's that's not a thing much anymore. You don't need that. But the digital cameras, I mean, I got it because you saw the results right away. And I think for learning photography in a lot of ways, and I know the new thing is to get film cameras and to get off digital. But honestly to to learn as a photographer, the best way to do that is take pictures and get feedback loops going. And when you gotta pay to develop every picture, that's kinda hard. And uh this makes a lot of sense anyway. So I was early in it and uh I've had a collection of digital cameras over the years and as a result, like you, I've got a lot of pictures. We should get our total photo number uh in a moment too. I have to look up, but cause I have photos too, and we're gonna talk about scanning and saving photos from different sources as well. But I have lots of scans. Uh you know, one of the things you have to do as you get older is help family members and friends with kind of preparing celebration of life or memorial type services. Yeah. And so there are big chunks in my photo library where it's like a couple hundred photos of a friend's family member or something similar. But my total, it seems like I think it's fifty one thousand one hundred eight photos and about fifty seven hundred videos. That's my total count right now. Fifty seven hundred videos. That's a lot of videos. Well, I take a lot on the phone now that I you know make vide os. So all right. So I've got fifty-seven thousand photos and three thousand videos. Pretty close. We're we're pretty close, both in that uh fifty something thousand. Yeah. So where do you take photos now? I mean, we still both have like professional cameras now, not digital like Fuji cameras, but where do you take photos now? Uh largely on my iPhone. I mean, that's my camera. I I have a nice Sony camera that I use, like I'm on it right now, if you're watching the YouTube. Uh, and this one I use all my video production stuff. It's really a video camera that's that's mounted in the studio. Uh occasionally, you know, someone in the family's graduating or wants like a really nice portrait, and I've got a portrait lens for it so I can, you know, dismount it and go take pictures. But I uh yeah, I do that two or three times a year. This camera largely stays locked. I I was thinking coming into the show, when's the last time I didn't I took a a fancy camera on vacation? And as near as I can tell, I think it was eight or nine years ago the last time I did that. Because you know, the iPhone cameras, there's just so much to like about it. Everything's geotagged, it's in your pocket. They take pretty good pictures now. So, you know, it's kind of hard to to make the case to put bring all that weight and and frankly, that expense. I always worry it's gonna get a lens cracked or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a I don't know if I ever actually took a big camera on vacation. Sometimes for for a big event, you know, my kids have like a dance recital or something. Yeah. I might do that, but I it honestly has been a long time. I do have an Sony A7 C2 , which is not as high end as like the A7 IV that I use for all my video stuff, but I wanted a second camera for B-roll and photos if I want to make a thumbnail. And so when it comes like iPhone season, I'll use that camera to film B-roll and then take a couple still photos for thumbnails afterwards. But that's pretty much the only occasion I have to do that. Even when I'm now at my kids' dance recital, a lot of times I want to get as close as I can and record a video and to try and do that with a mirrorless. Like I'm not bringing a tripod and all that stuff to the recital.. Yeah And so the telephoto lens on iPhone, just putting it into video mode, it actually looks incredible. And that's usually what I end up just doing. Well, since we're making camera disclosures, I actually have an A7 C1. Actually that wasn't one at the time. It was A7C. Yeah, yeah. And I've got that mounted as a top-down camera at my desk. And that was my old camera that I used to use. And for B-roll and things like that, I also own a DJI Pocket Three camera, which is so good. And it's on a little gimbal and you can again carry it around with you, put it in your pocket. Same. I I have an Osmo Pocket three. I use it anytime I travel. I used it at W W D C last year and CES earlier this year. Actually have somebody getting me a pocket four uh from not in the country because you can't get them in the US right now. Yeah, that's kind of a the funny thing. They made a new camera and you can't buy it here. Yeah. So uh my I had a very good friend uh hopefully was shipping it to me before dubdub this year if I go. Yeah. And um but it it is great. And one of the things too about a pocket like a little camera like that is you can connect your microphone wirelessly directly to the camera. You don't have to think about another box or another source for audio. It looks great. Built in gimbal it's it's uh pretty nice. And that that's frankly one of the reasons for the low Because I have I had the pocket one, then the pocket three. So I've always kind of done when we go somewhere, I'll bring that it fits in your pocket as the name implies, and audio's really good and I just find that the better platform to shoot video on. Because often I need my phone for other stuff. Now do you when you take photos, obviously a lot of them on your phone, maybe some with a professional camera. Do you ever put them someplace besides photos? Like do you ever go into files and folders and save images somewhere there? Or does it just all go into the photos app? Okay, my friend, you have now cracked open the backup uh heading in our outline. So I think we should just go there. Let's do it. Okay. All right. I want to talk about backup fully. And I was ready to come at you today, but it sounds like I might not need to. But before I come at you, I want to come at Apple. Um so what I would call a brief interlude into the iCloud iCloud storage inadequacies. So as we all know, Apple gives you five gigabytes for free of storage when you have an iCloud account. So spacious. Yeah. I looked it up. That was announced on June 6, 2011. That was at WWE C Steve Jobs announced it. Um that is going to hit the 15-year anniversary in WWC next month. So we're going to hit the 15-year anniversary of five gigabytes of free storage. So they have not improved it. They have not increased it in 15 years, which I mean in tech world is like a hundred years, right? It's true. Um I look it up. The Beatles they have had the five gigabytes here longer than the Beatles were together. Um longer than the entire moonshot program , longer than the entire history of the Harry Potter books, or the entire run of Friends. So all that stuff would have happened between the time they've announced it and now. Um and that is every time that comes up on the show, longtime listeners know I'm gonna bang on about this, but you know, in my head, you know, it used to be um uh Tim Cook listened to us in the gym, right? I'm pretty sure he listens to every episode in the gym. Right. I've never he's never told me that, but I just kind of feel it. I assume. I I feel like when he passed the baton to John Turnus, he said, John , you gotta listen to this . And and j if you look at that guy's biceps, you know he goes to the gym. he does. I'm thinking he's probably listening to it. Now, John , you're about to take over. If you wanna like really make us all feel good. Add a zero to that five. Just make it fifty. At least. And I think another interesting point. So the iPhone that was out at the time was the iPhone 4. Yeah. That was introduced in 2010, six or about eight months before that dubdub. And the base storage of the iPhone 4 was eight gigabytes. Yeah. And so just keep that in mind. It was five gigs of iCloud storage for an eight gigabyte phone, which you could probably back up that phone to iCloud without buying more storage at the time. But now the lowest storage you can get is 2 56 gigabytes. Yeah. And that is not comesurate. That is not raised, raised co measure it with the iCloud storage. Yeah, it's just you know and also just the the principle of you're gonna charge me a thousand plus dollars for an iPhone and and it's not gonna back up photos. I mean there are just so many horror stories. Making this show for the last, you know, many years, um, I have uh heard from so many listeners that lost photos. And it's just like and I'm sure the Mac Power users uh lose less photos than the typical users do. And Apple should just solve this problem and say, if you buy one of our thousand dollar phones, your photos are backed up. That's it. You don't need to buy anything extra. You don't need to pay for iCloud. You know, there's plenty of reasons to pay for iCloud separate from photo storage. And um, I think Apple could can definitely afford to to allow us to just back up our photos. And I think it would be a great selling point for the phone. Yeah. And I st I still have a lot of friends and family too who will run into like, my phone's out of storage. Yeah. I bought iCloud, but I still can't take another photo. And there's still like a disconnect and the lack of education, just helping regular and it's probably not MacPower user listeners, but maybe you have friends and family that have experienced this. They're like, I bought 200 gigs of iCloud storage and my phone is still full. And like we understand the problem there, but it's not immediately evident to just regular users. Yeah. And like even the the problem is that things fail quietly. You know, you're taking pictures. They should let's say you do see the picture on your phone, but you don't have iCloud connected right, or you don't have enough storage. So you assume that is backed up and then your phone falls into a lake and you get a new phone and you realize that all your picture's at the bottom of the lake. And it doesn't really let you know. Um, and people listening, just go to settings and look at your storage, and you'll see that photos are the big, you know, that's the big culprit in terms of your storage consumption and video consumption. And you know, I just recommend people pay it. It's kind of annoys me that people have to pay it when they buy these expensive phones, but I do wish Apple would would solve the problem. Yeah, and and maybe still just make it more clear what people are buying or why to buy it because yeah when you see the little settings badge like the red badge to say yeah you need iCloud buy iCloud storage it's like I don't even know if people understand like this is will save your photos. I feel like that that part needs to be bigger or louder. Yeah. So And then also like the problem is intensified by library sharing. Now that you've got the ability to share your library. My wife and I share library. It's just easy, right? I mean anything she takes, I see anything I take, she sees because we always share stuff. And the problem is my wife will take like seventeen pictures of her bagel, you know, and like and and people think, well, if we're shared, then it's on her storage, not mine. No, it goes into your library. That gets stored. I mean, that actually uses up more storage when you do it, which it's a great feature. It's fine, you know, but but that even intensifies the need to have increased storage and you know 15 years, guys, it's enough. And I will I I will offer one addendum to that. The iCloud shared photo library . Whoever created the shared library, like whoever in itiated it, it counts against their iCloud stor age, but other people who it gets shared with, it does not count towards theirs. Now, if you're in the same iCloud family, it kind of doesn't matter because you're also sharing the same iCloud pool. So in you're in your wife's situation, and mine, my wife's situation, like I'm paying for the same iCloud storage. But if you did have a case where you shared a photo library with a friend or family member who was not in your iCloud family, like the six people that can share like an Apple One subscription, it wouldn't count towards their iCloud storage. But if you share with your family, like you're most likely to do, it counts against your pool. Yeah. So but when it comes to backing up, I do I wanted to mention backblaze, which um I think you do you still use black backblaze? That is um subject to this discussion. Currently, I do. Right. And so I listened to the uh ATP guys and they had a long segment on backblaze, which as we've discussed in a past episode , I have not used Backblaze. Uh, but one of the issues now is Backblaze is not backing up cloud-stored files. So if you're like me and you put pretty much everything in iCloud Drive, Backblaze is not going to back up those files. It will back up local files that might be in like your movies folder, your music, or if you don't sync folders to iCloud, like if you uncheck the sync desktop and documents, then it would backblaze would back those folders up. But if you have everything in iCloud Drive, it doesn't back it up. And so you have to find a different solution for that. So if I have everything like I do Does that mean it's getting backed up at Backblaze or not? It seems like Backblaze is just skipping any cloud synced file, even if it's local on your machine. Uh and one of the issues of that is a permissions, which I get this issue even on my Mac, like shortcuts sometimes doesn't have permission to like write a file to my desktop because it's syncing with iCloud Drive. And so it seems like Backblaze is not, even if it's saved locally on your computer, it is not going to back up those files. Well, I've been telling listeners for years to use Backblaze because it's easy, it's uh reasonably priced, and it just gets all your stuff off site. So now I have to amend that because you know you're not getting your pictures backed up, which is the most important thing. So uh listeners be advised , we will be doing an updated um backup show probably in a couple of months, probably after WWDC calms down. And um and we're gonna be looking at options and come to you with real solutions. And I will say, and this is where hopefully you'll be uh you'll be happy, David. I purchased it's a $15 one-time purchase parachute backup. It's in the Mac App Store. So you know it went through the app review process, but for $15, Parachute Backup can backup your iCloud drive, all the files and folders, and or your iCloud photos. So you can have it do one or both of those things. So if you just want to do your photos, just your iCloud. And what it will do is basically copy all of your files and folders and keep in sync if you do a scheduled backup to an external SSD, spinning hard drive, or even a network attached storage. So I'm going to point it at my network attached storage and it basically just downloads my iCloud drive, all the files and folders, copies it there, and then in future backups, we'll keep them in sync. And it's smart enough where if a file is in the cloud but not local, it will download the file temporarily, copy it to your destination, and then offload that file so your Mac isn't full of stuff, if you know if you don't have enough internal storage on your Mac. Yeah. So I'm gonna do it, David. I'm backing everything up. Excellent. So have you started that or you just got the software? Well here's the thing, David, I was got you. Gotcha. My net my network attached storage, it was like 90 something percent full. I priced out larger spinning discs, and because of the crisis right now with storage and ramp prices, I'm not about to do that. So I'm cleaning it out. My my Synology is going through a process of cleaning it out to free up some space. And once that's done, hopefully later today, I'm going to run a backup and have it just scheduled to do it every week. And you weren't kidding when you talked about on a recent show about how much the prices of OWC drives have gone up. I mean it's like it's like eleven hundred dollars for a terabyte uh four terabyte fast SSD right oh yeah it's insane and even the spinning drives even the spinning drives if you want to get the higher like eight ter abyte twelve or sixteen, like it's thousands and thousands of dollars. So wow. Yeah it's crazy. But do you have any other backup methods besides like that local backup storage? Yeah, so many. So many stories. So many brag about it, David, all right? I'm not gonna well I just let's just say my pictures are in many places. And uh we'll we'll do a full backup show. I don't wanna go down the whole rabbit hole now. We'll never get out. But uh this news about back place is very concerning to me and I'm gonna look into it. And uh when we do the the revised show, I'm gonna be looking for an offsite solution for people. I mean, one of the best off site solutions, frankly, is a family member. Just get an extra spinning drive, you know, archive everything, get two of them really is what you should do. And then just like every time you see your sister or whatever, just swap it out and say, okay, here, you know, and they keep it out of their house. So someone s breaks into your house or if your house catches on fire, there's at least an off-site that's an easy one but i i really like the idea of of a service like backblaze where it's like out of the state and just safe somewhere else so we'll see um but but i have a lot to talk about that i'm glad you're doing that, Steven. Another app to take a look at is um super duper and carbon copy cloner. Those are also apps that allow you to kind of mirror and keep up to date off site. But if you've got one you like, go with it. You also sync them to another service like Google Photos or Amazon or anything? I have not in the past because I had back blaze, but that is something I'm gonna have to look at. I mean I I recently switched over to Google and I man, you guys are having a great time emailing me about that. Thanks everybody for pointing out what a sellout I am for going to Google. But I have a Google uh workspace account, so I've got a bunch of of Google drive space that I don't use for anything, so I might I might look into that. I'm also gonna I'm gonna link a post in our forum. Uh this is actually from hobby collector and the talk.macpowerusers.com, but they actually emailed black Backblaze directly to ask about this iCloud storage and I'll just link that to read Backblaze's response. But it seems like as I stated before, that is it is not happening. Even if a file is local, it's not gonna get backed up. Yeah. Don't you hate it when you rely on something and it just flakes on you. Yes, I do. And and that's why that's why I'm backing up now, David. But I also I also will say I've been doing this for a while. I used to back up my iCloud photos to Dropbox by having just the Dropbox app on my iPhone sync. I've since moved away from that just because Dropbox didn't have a great photo viewer and I didn't use the management features. So I do have Google photos, which I already pay for like the two terabyte Google Drive tier anyway. I have Google Photos running on an iPhone Air, which I use as my beta device, but I am also syncing my iCloud photos to Google Drive or to Google Photos. And this way, if I ever want to try out an Android phone or use some of the new Gemini AI features for photos, all my photos are in Google Photos. And they even have some interesting sync features now where it will sync your favorites. So favorite photos that you favorite on your iPhone, it will sync as favorite photos to Google photos. And so they're doing a lot better at keeping things in sync, keeping edits and uploading the full quality versions of photos. And so that's something that I've done for a while and I'm gonna keep doing. And I'm gonna have to go down a whole rabbit hole about the best way to get my photos copied to Google Photos. And uh I don't but what how did you do it before I start? I just install the Google Photos app on this iPhone. I give it full access to everything. Like leaving my phone a phone screen on for a day or two, but for this process, I just let it do it. You know, I went to the settings, display, never auto lock, keep the Google Photos app open on my iPhone, and I just let it upload everything, and uh they're back ed up. Okay. So winding back from this, I uh the primary way I access my library is on my Mac Studio. It's got a nice big drive on it and I have all of my photos marked to be downloaded at all times . That's one of the advantages of giving Apple extra money for storage, is you don't have to keep your photos in the cloud. And I find that fantastic. You know, the photos are always there, always when I need them. That said, my wife 's laptop, she has them cloud stored, you know, because she doesn't have enough space and that that works fine well as well. I know people listening will uh will be using both camps, but if you have the available storage, I strongly recommend just download them all. It just makes working with them so much easier. I if you had talked to me about two years ago, David, before I got my new Mac Studio, I didn't have my photos downloaded locally anywhere. Every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad, photo it was optimized for storage, and there was no single place where my entire photo library was local. But that did change when I got my newer Mac Studio. I'm yeah, got a huge SSD, and so like you, my Mac Studio houses my entire photo library, and that will be backed up soon as well. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by OnePassword. 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Okay. So we both uh shared the fact that we have a lot of photos. Uh one of the ways to do library and photo management, I think, is pruning. You know, what's the best way to do that? Going back to the old days with my parents when we had 24 pictures to shoot each year, uh, now that's not the case. People shoot 24 pictures of a single pose. Because of the digital cameras, it's so easy to keep mashing that button. And that's great, right? It gives you a lot of options to choose from. You can find the actual picture where the kids were looking at the camera and smiling, I get it. But at the same time, keeping all that stuff really leads to bloat in your library. What are the best ways, Steven, to uh to get some of that cruft out of there? Well, you have some apps that I I'll leave you to feature 'cause for me, I do it with shortcuts, if you know me. And there are a couple of recent ones that I've written, and I will link these shortcuts down in the show notes. One is for screenshots, which in later versions of iOS and in iOS 26, you can hide screenshots from your library view in the photos app, which is fine, but I actually don't want them there at all. Like I want to delete my screenshots because I take a lot of screenshots because I share them on social media. And so I have a shortcut where it will delete the last 30 days of screenshots completely. But before it does that, it saves them all to a folder in my iCloud drive. And so I now have a folder just called screenshots in my iCloud Drive and with Cloud Cowork, I can always search that folder for anything that might be in those screenshots. And so if I need to look for something, I'll just ask Cloud Cowork. I've even asked it to just go through and rename all those files periodically. And so I remove my screenshots that way. And then the other thing that takes up a lot of storage in my photo library is long videos. I might use my iPhone to record a 10 minute video. Like at CES, I use my phone a lot. And so I have another shortcut that can identify videos longer than 10 minutes and it moves them all to an album. And then I can look at that album and see if there's any videos I want to keep, any I want to get rid of and then I can make the decision uh what to do there. And what's funny is the first time I ran that, the album actually pulled my old one of my longest videos on my iPhone, which is my very first YouTube video. I filmed my very first YouTube video back in 2020 during the pandemic with my iPhone. It's like 20 minutes long. It was all about screen time. If you go to my YouTube channel and sort by oldest, it's still there. That was an iPhone video. And uh but I didn't I want to keep that one. So yeah, sure. That's gonna stay in iCloud. Yeah, I uh as people who make content like we do get a lot of extra pictures and screenshots and things like that. But even just for folks who aren't doing that, you do get a lot of blow. My primary method, frankly, is just pruning them manually. I am constantly in the photos app. I really like looking at the pictures. Um, one of my favorite things is every couple days is I take pictures from the last few days and I copy them over to day one, the journaling app , as a really cool feature, where when you import a photo, it inherits the timestamp from that photo. So like if we go out to dinner and I take a picture of the family, I can drag that into day one and it creates an entry for that exact time. And then I can write why that was a fun e vent. And so I'm always pulling things out of photos for that. And you know, just I have a lot of reasons to to open photos. And anytime I see like a photo shoot, I'm holding up air quotes where uh, you know, we went to dinner and we uh we took like six or seven pictures of ourselves and we only needed one, I will actually prune it right there and just get rid of the other six. And I think that's fine. I'm not a professional photographer. I know a lot of people always want to have the picture. Uh, what was it? The famous picture with Clinton and Lewinsky where somebody had it in the background and he made all that money off of it. That's not me, you know. I'm just taking pictures of my family, and my wife's taking pictures of her bagels. You know, we don't need a lot of them. So I go and prune it manually. But if you're if you've got a lot of old pictures and you haven't been doing that, there's actually some some good apps out there. I think my favorite is Gemini, which is uh the same guys who make setup, uh forget the name of the company, but it's one of the it's a Ukrainian developer, and uh same people who make clean my MacX. Uh what's the name of that developer, Steven? Uh Macpaw, Macpaw. Macpaw, yeah, exactly. Uh they've got an algorithmic and AI kind of tool called Gemini that you can point at your library and it will do a good job of finding similar images. It'll try and recommend the best one to keep. And you can make it automated or you can make it manual. So you've got a lot of control over that. And I think that's an excellent app. That's where I would start if you're looking to clean out Croft in your library. If you have uh Power Photos, which is another nice photo management app, there are some tools in there for that. But for this job, I think Gemini is probably the winner. Um, if you want to do it on mobile, uh, my kids use an app called swipe wipe and i was asking them about it at dinner and they they love it and it just gives them their pictures and there's a bunch of apps that have done this over the last few years where you just see your pictures and you swipe left to keep and right to trash. And so it's almost like going through social media, but it's cleaning your library at the same time and a lot healthier than going through social media. So that's kind of cool. And then there's another one that's very popular, and I played with it a lot, but I don't have a lot of experience with it. But it has a lot of positive reviews, so I went ahead and included it called AI Cleaner, which is more AI-based and more, you know, if you have like a hundred thousand photos and you really want to get a lot of junk out of there, AI cleaner, I think is probably something you should look at. But uh those are all good tools to help you to prune the library down. I was gonna ask, I didn't outline, but I'm curious. Now with iOS privacy features, photos like those, like apps like those that you just mentioned, they ask for photo access and you have to choose am I giving it give it full library access or selected photo access. What is your default when you see an app ask for that kind of stuff? It just depends on what it needs. Like when I deal with an AI app and I want to share a photo with it and it asks for full, I say no, because I'm just giving it one photo. But in this case, if it's a tool that I'm using to clean my library, it's going to need to see them all. So I'll I would give it access. I I've when apps like TikTok and Instagram and things like that, I limit access for my library. I always do that. Uh but yeah, obviously for a photo manager you're gonna need to give it full access. You can always revoke it later. You know, you can always go to settings, privacy, photos, and and revoke access after you've used it. But yeah, you gotta give it full access. And honestly, see MacPaw is a developer that I trust. I I met those guys, you know, several times. They seem like they're really kind of on top of things. I like the the way Clean My Mac works. I like the way Gemini works and I feel like that's a developer I can trust. So yeah, that's the one I use primarily. Absolutely. Okay, Steven. So once you've got them pruned, how do you organize them? So this I used to be very meticulous about creating albums for an event, sometimes a shared album if it was like a family trip. And I still have done that. And now I have albums for different things like different like podcasts. Like I have a Mac Power User's photo album because there might be images that I use often , whether uploading a profile image or whatever. And so my photo album curation, it has decreased in the amount of albums I create, also because of the great features that Apple Intelligence has brought in recognizing and surfacing memories through the Photos app, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So I have a bunch of albums and shared albums from the past from my travels. When I worked at a travel company, I have albums for every trip. I had an album for every kid's birthday, and then as you have subsequent kids, like that falls off because you just can't sustain it. Yeah, no, you mean both. I I feel like it's a it's a journey. And um yeah. Like in the old days before we had automated sorting, that was the only way to find the pictures. So, you know, as dads we would it's like, hey, it's Easter, I gotta make a you know, two thousand and ten Easter album, you know , and in my family, a lot of them were the shared albums that, you know, Apple had. And so we've got all these albums and and you can see them like religiously created at each intro increment. And then at some point they got less and less and at one point they just stopped. And yes uh I was telling people in the Max Barkley labs, I feel like uh laziness has been rewarded by artificial intelligence. You know, there were those of us that always uh would name all our documents and organize all our photos and apply tags and we were the ones that had it together and now um you can just throw an AI at these things and get what you need out of it very easily. And the people who didn't waste all their time doing that have been rewarded . Which I I still I'm glad I have some of those albums. Like and I don't delete them, you know, I don't delete my you know middle son's second birthday. Although I will say my middle son, uh he listen, he does not suffer from middle child anything. But he uh he will often uh exclaim there's way more photos of my youngest, my daughter, uh than he and of course he does not realize there's many more photos of him than my oldest son but it's simply a result of like with newer iPhones like if you just follow the the hockey stick curve of as iphones got newer and better, we were just taking more photos. You just took more. I had the thing when I I so my my siblings are much older than I am. I was born I was a I was a boo-boo baby, I'm pretty sure. I never really had that conversation with my parents, but I showed up , you know, my my youngest sister is like seven years older than me, you know. And um so we used to have movie night where they'd get the projector out in the eight millimeter films and there's like there was like 50 movies to watch and I was in like one of them. My parents got tired. They're like, I'm tired. I'm not going to shoot as many of these things. This is going to come again when we talk about physical photo books. Because I also had I used to be very faithful. But the last thing I will say about the like photo line I am stingy and particular about favorites because I do like going to my favorite section and seeing very specific photos that I wanted to save and favorite, uh, which then also plays into lock screens and apple watch faces and all that kind of stuff. So I'm particular about that and fac es. Because I don't do the albums as much, I am particular about you know setting the faces for my friends and family uh you know, up to a certain amount and making sure to train that enough, which I spent a lot of time doing it. And a lot of times that makes the finding photos much easier. And a lot of those collections or memories that your iPhone is just going to do, it makes all of those much more effective. Uh if it knows faces, if it's been trained, if it has, you know, favorites. And so I try to do that, you know, periodically. Keep that pretty well. Yeah. I I do the same. I really the faces are such a great entry point, you know, because you can put a token when you do the search, say, you know, search for Stephen, and like it will immediately filter down. And the training methodology that it uses that's all done locally on device. And uh it's very easy. Like again, it almost feels like uh uh playing with a social media app and like, oh, that's Steven, but that's not Steven, and then train on that. Now give me another list and then suddenly they're just all Steven the ones it finds. And it doesn't take long to get it working well. And it is a great entry point to finding a picture. And I'll also do it for my doorbell camera because if you have a home kit secure or home kit video doorbell, your home pods and your phone can announce who's at the door. And uh I'll even do like acquaintances that might come to the house a couple of times a year because I like seeing, you know, just get the notification and the home pods will say so and so's uh at the door. But my my question for you was if you want to find a specific photo, like a specific person at a specific place or time, where do you go for that? How do you find it? I go into the photos app and I'll start with the name of the person because like I said, it's all tokenized and if I know generally when it was, I'll put in the year or whatever, you know, and um and just let it do a search and it almost always finds it. Search has been pretty good and has improved lately. My method, because I usually know where a photo was taken, if not the year, or even who's in it , I will go to the maps area of the collections and photos and just zoom in on where I know the photo was taken and try to zoom in close enough where you know it kind of separates the groups out more and more the more you zoom in. And I will go to like the 30 or 50 photos that were taken at a location, sometimes hundreds, depending on where it was, and I will look for that. It doesn't work like at home because you take so many pictures at home usually, and then there's just too many photos there. But I'll go to the map, zoom in, and if you're ever looking for a photo that you're not sure when it was or who was in it, I find that to be a pretty reliable way to find it. Uh do you want to guess how many pictures the Sparks family has taken in the Anaheim area, which happens to be the location of the Disneyland Resort. I'm gonna guess 8,000. 23,000. That's half your library. Yes. Wow. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Well, and I have like there's a couple different auditoriums and theaters in Lakeland where my wife has performed and my kids perform. And so I do have like hundreds in a couple pockets uh in in some cities. Yeah and and that that interaction is really great in the app. You can zoom in and it you know it will get more granular as you zoom in. And that's another great vector to go in and find a photo. And that's why tagging and folders and stuff is harder to justify at this point because it's just so easy to go in and find it. And like um, we're gonna talk later about that Apple Intelligence uh gallery feature and like this stuff is just only getting better. Yeah. And it and it is very good. Now you mentioned earlier you do the shared library feature with your wife. I do the same thing. You can have it set a couple ways where it defaults to sharing or you choose in the camera app, how do you have your set? I just share it all. And she does the same. You share everything? Yeah. See, I take so many like nerdy techie photos because I'm posting stuff on social media. I f I gotta do that. Well my my wife is involved with like the the card making group at her church and um so sometimes I'll get a drop of like fifty pictures of a of a color palette or something. Nice. See. So I should really probably scale that back. But I don't know. It it's nice. Kind of going back to my day one thing that I like to do. Right. My wife is much better about taking a picture at a family dinner than I am. And so like having her photos in there allows me to grab those and timestamp the day one entry. And so I I really like having it and I don't mind. See I've not been uh one to journal until the Apple Journal app . And once that came out, I actually used that and and really enjoy how it does the photos, videos, and locations. Like it'll even do so much a thing where if there was a podcast you were listening to and you were at a par k and you took a photo, like it will just put all of that together in an entry and then you can just write a few words about it. The only thing about the journal app is there's a maximum number of photos and videos, and it won't let you attach long videos because there's like a storage issue or some kind of maximum. So that's an unfortunate part. But if you at least tag one photo from the event, then you can jump to that photo in your all photos library and then see the ones that were taken around it. Yeah. Well, one day I'm going to talk to you about journaling soon, because that's that's another great show. I'm just getting on the backup tip. So yeah, we'll get there next. Exactly. Let's get you backed up first. Yeah, yeah, do that. I want to go down a little side path here on artificial intelligence and photo metadata. I mean, Apple Intelligence has got tools for that. Maybe in June they'll get even better. But I did some experimentation kind of for today's show, just because I've got a a big honkin clot account. Um I took exported photos and tried to have it work on those for me. Uh I was very curious, like you were talking earlier about scanning old family photos, like could I do a good job of applying metadata to those with an artificial intelligence tool? And the answer is yes. Just like scanning old scan documents, you can also take old scan photos. They can go in and work with metadata. They could do a good job. If you tell it enough, it can name the photos appropriately. Um, it can do some metadata work, but what it can't do is like figure out what day it was taken. It's just going to look at the scan date. Although I did have a couple old photos. For a while in the 70s and early 80s, there was a thing where they would burn in the date on the photo when you shot the photo. I don't know if this is before your time, but I don't know what it was like 'cause it was like a little almost digital readout in the lower right corner. And the camera would do it. It would burn it into the film. And and I I'm not even sure that it was the date that the the image was taken or the date that it was developed. But you know, it kind of gets you in a ballpark. And then also sometimes like I had some where we had written the date on the back. And it it because I'd scanned both sides, it was able to work with that. So it does some work. Like scene tagging is really good. Like it can figure out that this is at a wedding or this one's at a beach. It can do stuff like that. If you tell it those are pictures of Stephen, then it can find other pictures of Stephen in the folder if you give it enough context. I mean, the whole thing with all this AI stuff is the brain is plenty smart, but the context is always weak. So you have to give it more context. But what I found is it it actually did a pretty good job. Um uh the the the downside is AI does everything with 100% certainty. So when it was wrong, it was bad because you know having a photo that's undated is better than having a photo with the wrong date on it. And uh, but it was generally able to do that. Now, I'm not seeing myself doing a lot of this in the future. I prefer to use Apple photos, and I this is a thing where I'm kind of sitting on Apple Intelligence and hoping at some point it will be able to help me manage all those old family scans in the in the library. But it is a solution that you could go with now if you're willing to round trip your photos. Yeah, and I've been using Apple Intelligence through shortcuts to do a number of things with photos. I mentioned, I think, on last week's episode with Jason Snell, you know, I'll take pictures of physical book pages that I'm reading. Uh this way I can summarize and search that later through a shortcut. I do that. Speaking of Claude though, one of the things I do every week uh for primary technology, I do a bunch of chapter art, and I like those to be perfectly square because that's how most podcast apps will display them. And so now I've gotten to the point where I'll save a bunch of images from online, put them in a folder, and then just tell Claude, hey, crop all these images to a perfect square and focus on the subject if, any, you know, like a face or something. And it does it. It's per and it does it perfectly. And I get all the images perfectly square. And so, you know, it can not only recognize and rename images and files, but even manipulate them, like you're saying, like cropping them and stuff like that. Yeah, when you look at the stuff Adobe's doing, it's really clear. And I I don't really want to go down editing today because we've got enough here, but you know, it used to require, as they would say, a particular set of skills to do a good job editing photos. And I think the tools already exist for normal folk to just give it an image and say, edit this to make it look nice, you know, kind of like the enhance button on steroids that we have on the iPhone. Yeah. And like using Adobe Tools and and PixelMater as well, you can now really improve an image without really knowing what you're doing. For sure. And uh one other thing uh before we get too far, for searching, live text, which was introduced a long time ago uh from Apple, the the ability to like search the text that are in photos also works for videos if you weren't aware. And so if you took a two-minute video of a place and there's any kind of text in that video in any frame, you can search your photo library and it will pull that up. And I have done that sometimes for phone numbers, sometimes if I'm trying to remember a restaurant that we went to or a phone number, but even like recovery keys and serial numbers, there'll be times like if I'm setting up a new Mac and you know it shows the recovery key on screen, you can write it down and you can type it. But a lot of times I'll just take a picture of it with my phone because I know I can search later recovery key and all the photos that have recovery key will will come up. So all right, Steam . Can we talk for a minute about sharing? Yes. Please., yeah I I share a lot of photos, but what uh what do you do? Because you do have the shared library with your spouse. What else? Yeah. Um, well, it just kind of depends. Uh I use all the tools. Like my um 80-some-year-old mother-in-law, her favorite technology term is airdrop. And um you know, every time we have a family gathering, she'll just start yelling airdrop randomly as we take pictures. And just shout it in the air and hopefully. Pictures of her grandkids and all that. But the um so yeah, airdrop plays a role with her and uh do you how how what is the overunder on airdrops reliability for you? Like it's been solid. It has been solid. But but I also have opened up the the window wider than I probably should. I think I've got it set. Any friend can airdrop me and I I uh don't have it to anybody in the world but any friend can't and um anybody in my contacts database and it it generally works. I mean I can't think of the last time it failed on me. How about you? It yeah, I struggle with it sometimes. My mom's phone specifically, because that's who I'm usually airdropping to. Like we were at a recital. I want to airdrop her photos. She uh won't show up in the airdrop menu. And I'll even try the head-to-head iPhone like how you would do name drop, but if you have the share sheet open, it should just airdrop whatever's on the share sheet, even if it's photos. And it will do like the glowy thing and both tops of the iPhones will do it. But it won't uh sometimes it's just won't do it. And so I don't know if it's her phone specifically or or what. All right. I don't know. They also started a new if if you want to airdrop to everyone, there's now a six digit pin code that's required. Uh so if someone's not in your contacts and you do airdrop for everyone, you'll see a six-digit pin code show up on your device, and you'll have to give it to the other person so they can airdrop it to you. And that's a new iOS 26 like security feature. But when you get the photos, so we share them, we airdrop them. Where do you use or how do you use photos widely? Well, on our Apple Watch episode, I talked about I actually use an Apple Watch face and I like it. Actually, it rotates. It's my weekend watch face. Yeah, it will scroll through photos of my kids and my wife in black and white. And it's been a great place to kind of relive photos and see them and if I haven't thought about them. Do you use them anywhere, like wallpapers, lock screen, anything? Not particularly. I I'm not good at that. Um I was just looking at all my wallpapers. They're all boring. I should probably get more colorful with my wallpapers, but I I don't put them there. Like I guess I really enjoy like every few days I'm in day one updating and I look at the photos and reflect on them and write about them. And that's probably the most interaction I do with the photos. But um we also have them on the Apple TV and when we have family events we just have them there. And uh when my kids are at my house, uh we when we're all together, a frequent thing we'll do is just sit on the couch and share pictures to the TV and just kind of talk about it. Like we're getting ready to go on vacation next month and we we're looking at we went to this place before so we were putting up the pictures of the the last few times we went there and just I don't know. It it's a very common thing for us to share them with each other. But I don't keep them like on my lock screen. I I don't do it on my phone, I but I do do it on my watch. And the other thing I do is with the photos, the stock photos widget on iPhone, there's not a great way to just show a single photo. You can either choose uh like favorites or featured and then it will rotate automatically or you can choose an album and then it will kind of rotate through that album. You can create an album with just a single photo , but if you like your photo organization clean, like we do, that you're not usually inclined to do that. So I do want to shout out Widget Smith, great app by underscore David Smith, maker of Pedometer Plus Plus. But the Widget Smith app, I use this on a couple home screens, namely my evening and weekend home screens. So I can have a single photo on the home screen in a widget that never changes. It's a photo of my family. Uh I have it in the top of a widget stack. And it's just the easiest way to just have a single photo static on a home screen without trying to hack the album feature and the the built-in photo widget. And so for that reason alone, I use widget smith for for some of that. But I will say in favor of the photo widget, it does a great job of finding good photos. Like it does. I don't know what it's doing , but it finds photos that look good and I'll I'll usually have some emotional pull for me . It does. It's very good at that. And to your point earlier saying like sharing photos on the TV. One of the things we've been in the habit of like if we have a birthday or it's Mother's Day or Father's Day, sometimes you get to that point in the day where it's like what, do we do now? You know, is it board game time? Is it do we just leave? And in those moments, we've been trying to intentionally open the photos app. Again, the photos app has been really good at like detecting if it's a day , whether it's a birthday in your family and then that birthday's in your contact cards, or if it's a special holiday like Mother's Day, Father's Day. And we've just been playing those moments, I think, or the memories that the Photos app calls it on the Apple TV. And it is a great thing just to do when you have family around in like the, you know, probably few times a year you're doing it, whether it's holidays or whatever. And so yeah, like they was saying, I would encourage you just throw them up on the Apple TV, pick a memory that it's doing, or now you can prompt it. You can say, make a memory featuring these people on these days or whatever, and just uh enjoy your photos that way. It's a good way to do it. Yeah. That's kind of what we do too. Same thing. And like , and whoever's there, it's always fun to find old picture, yeah, 20-year-old picture of who's there, and they enjoy it as well. It's a very common thing we do around here. Uh, you mentioned the Apple Intelligence uh feature and I just want to call that out. Like we've been giving Apple Intelligence a hard time, but this is one of the really great implementations of it in my opinion, where you just open it up, you shout out a few words and it makes a great album. It is good. And I also say, Apple Intelligence Aside, like I still use the slideshow, make a slideshow feature in photos. And again, this goes back to like creating a memorial service for somebody or like a graduation or end of the year celebration for school. When I want to just take a bunch of photos, have it make a slideshow that's seven minutes and time it to music, the built-in create a slideshow feature is still great at that. Just using the built-in photos app. And one feature I do miss, David. I we used to as a family every year print out a photo book of the year's photos. We have a collection, I think we did it six or seven years in a row. And then once we had our third child, it was just over. And we didn't do any sense. And it was no longer built into the photos app, which then created a consternation of like where do we go or how do we do this? And we have not done a photo book in a very long time, but I really cherish those books and wish we had kept it up. Yeah, I I actually want to go back and do that. All this like parallels with day one for me, but day one also has the ability to print books from your journals. And like I want to go back and like recreate some of those when I have a little more time because I have the pictures and you know, still got my marbles. I can put this together and uh I think that needs to be done. Uh for the slideshow, I want to call out an app. This is uh for old time MPU listeners, I used to talk about this app like 15 years ago, but Photo Magico . Um, its still exist. I haven't used it in years, but they have version six now. And that is a great slideshow app. You know, for a lot of family members, I'm always the one putting together the slideshow for the memorial or the wedding or whatever . And I used to use that app exclusively for it, and it is outstanding. I have honestly never heard of this app, David. It gives you a lot more control than you get with the Apple app. You know, you're going to have to pay for it. Uh, but it is great. And the trick is you when you do a wedding, you you the bride and groom give you all the pictures, you put it together, you know. I I used to always tell them that the app would crash after 10 minutes because I didn't want to have a fifteen minute slideshow. And uh you know 'cause I mean look nobody in the room watches that. Yeah. Maybe they think they do, but no, you know. But but then what I would do is during the wedding when they're at the altar it always go take a picture during the wedding and I'd slide it in at the very last slide of the thing it would fade in you know for an hour before when they were at the the altar and that was always that was always a good good move . But yeah, photo, photo magic, though, man. Thumbs up. I haven't used it in years, but I I bet it's just as great as it used to be. I I knew the developer at one point, and um those guys were really serious about making this a good app. That's cool. Now, do you ever print out single prints? And this is something around the holidays we try to think what to get, like mothers and mothers-in-laws, dad, whatever. Like we try to print out photos sometimes. I'll typically go to like a canvas print random website and this is not a great print quality but uh sometimes I'll just go to Walgreens because it's the fastest and just do that. Do you ever print out photos? Yeah we we do that frequently. We'll we'll send like the last quarter's worth of of winners out and then we'll get them and get the do uh we're not doing it expensively. We're we're get the duplicates and then we can give the duplicates to the appropriate people. Yeah. And uh we do that often. And and that is credit to my wife. She's the one who always manages that . This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm . Get 15% off the powerful live streaming platform for the Mac. Just go to ecam.com/slash Mac PowerUsers. If you're a Mac user who creates video or podcasts, you need Ecamm. Ecamm Live is the all-in-one studio built exclusively for the Mac, so it looks, feels, and performs like a native Pro app should. Whether you're live streaming, recording a podcast, or producing training videos, Ecamm gives you broadcast level control with drag and drop simplicity. 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Uh I have been working on this, so I've got some recommendations. The first one is if you just got like one or two pictures you want to capture, and I think everybody listening should probably download this app, a Google Photo Scan. I tried like 10 of these apps and the Google one wins. The way it works is it puts four dots around the image. So you move the camera around and you're actually getting various angles of the picture and it effectively removes any glare. Because a lot of times those old pictures have a very shiny gloss to them. It's hard to get a good capture of it with your phone. But photo, uh Googleoto ph scan, just have it on your phone. If you're at a family member's house and they've got a good old picture you want to capture, you just whip out your phone, move it around the picture a little bit, and you get a good image of it. So I think that's an easy one. Uh photo scanning is the bigger question. What if you've got a box of them and you want to get them scanned? There's two routes for that. You can buy a photo scanner or you can use a mail-in service. And I think the best photo scanners these days don't have them, but based on the research I did for the show is the Epson ones are the ones people are always talking about now. They've got one that's kind of like the old scan snap where it will zip through a bunch of them. It's called the fast photo and you know it is a fast photo. And then they've got a better quality one, the Epson perfection line, where you've got to lay it on a flatbed, close the lid. It's going to take a lot longer to scan with those, but you'll get uh better quality scans with those. So if you want to yourself, that's the way. Um, we did a thing when my mom passed, I don't know, about 10 years ago, and the service we used is gone, but um I did a little research on this and a couple that are really good right now. Um one is called Scan My Photos , very well uh reviewed, and it seems like uh the trustworthy. And they do a great bulk job. You can send them boxes of photos and you'll get a scans back, which is really nice. Uh another one that's more expensive, kind of a white glove version of that, is ever present. And I think if you have like archival photos and you just don't want to send it off to a like bulk scanner, that'd probably be the one to look at. But if you're just looking at a box of snapshots, I think you could be just fine with scan my scan my photos. But those services are really nice. And they're getting better than they were when I did them in the sense that now they'll actually try to put metadata on them for you and get you a little better uh data. But again, you know, garbage in, garbage out. They've got to know what the metadata is to apply it. But uh if you've got an old box of photos, by all means, just send them out and then you can share them. Yeah, and that I typically just use the scanner here at my house, but that is a pretty tedious process if you're trying to scan, you know, a bunch of them. And I just have a j just a regular like printer scanner combo. I will say that uh Epson fast photo shack is on the landing page. So Yeah, I know. You know, that's that's something. It's su it's such a funny picture. He's just sitting there with a piece of hardware and he's smiling and like and he's thinking, you know what he's thinking? He's thinking I'm gonna cash that check. I better get this check on the way out. They're not mailing this. Um one thing I'll mention too, uh in addition to photos, I know my dad he used to record literally dozens of eight millimeter tapes on his camcorders. So it runs in the family. The RCA plugs in, you know, the red, white, yellow in, and it will record to an SD card. Uh what it like it has to do it in real time. You know, you don't you can't do like two X or anything. Sure. But he had done a number of his tapes uh for a couple of years they all saved to an SD card and then we threw him up into iCloud Drive speaking of things that I want to back up and we have a bunch of video like from when I was two and three years old. He has videos from even before I was born that he took on like little family vacations. And so if you have that briefcase of eight millimeter tapes like my dad did, like try to even if it's just a few of those tapes, try to digitize them. You can do this yourself at home you just need as long as your old camcorder or whatever has the three plugs and I literally bought uh the same model camcorder that my dad had because his broke so I went on eBay and bought one that worked so we can put the tapes in and have the RCA out into this little device and we'll link all this in the show notes. Uh but that digitizing uh means a lot and uh I used a lot I still have all those videos. So we actually have a BHS of our wedding that I I don't have anything to play it in. That's yeah. That's the thing. That's the thing. Well you can get this. Well the problem is you have to get a VHS, you have to get a V CR and then get one of these devices. But it's worth it's worth it, David. You know, just but Steven, when you tell me this story, the fact that you have digitized video of yourself two years old and you didn't have an effective backup plan, it just makes me angry. I gotta tell you. The backup is the eight millimeter tape still at my par par ents' house. Uh but I'm back I'm gonna back them up. I'm waiting for some stuff to delete off my uh Synology. Waiting for stuff to delete. Okay. I gotta I need to just free up some space. All right. But uh speaking of like photo legacy, um, my dad did pass away about four, three and a half years ago. And one of the things that you know we all are going to have to deal with eventually is how to we access, what do we keep of our friends and family members? And one of the features that I always encourage people to set up and I have set up on my even my devices for myself is that legacy contact feature. And this is something that's it's on your iPhone. Uh, you know, there's there's also a trusted contact feature if you ever need to like recover your Apple ID, which I also suggest, just so you have backup there. But the legacy contact means that even after someone is deceased, that that legacy contact can then access that iCloud data, be able to get those photos or whatever else is synced. And so highly recommend setting that up. Uh and also like I actually still have my dad's iPhone and his photo library and everything is here. I backed it up. Speaking of backup, I did like a local Mac backup of the iPhone. This way I can just have all that data locally. Uh, but I still have the phone because I also still pay for his ATT line just because I feel like there might be a login someday where it's going to try and text a two-factor code. And like my dad was not good with passwords. He had like an Apple note and he he would wouldnn't't write down the full password. He would write down this like code to help him remember the password. It's like this cryptographic note is not gonna help me at all if I ever need to get an account. So I still have like I still pay for his line just in case. And I don't know when I'll stop doing that. But well I I feel like Apple digital legacy contact kind of came in under the radar. And a lot of people there'll be people listening to this have never heard of it. But basically you can go into it and say, look, if the uh bus with my number on it comes down the street, it it gives access to my data to other people. Right. And it's not just one person, you can make it for multiple people. So I think you should do it. And as the people who do my productivity field guide, hear me say often none of us are getting out of this a life. It doesn't matter if you're listening to this and you're fifteen or ninety-five, you know, you should set this up. You never know, right? And um and it makes it really easy for your survivors to get your data, which you know, they are going to want your photos. Yeah. I mean, more than anything. And that needs to be handled. And uh, you know, you can have multiple contacts. Um it's just not your photos. They get your notes, your mail, your contacts, your calendars, your iCloud drive files, messages, voice memos, and health data, it gets a bunch of stuff, you know. Uh of course, because of commerce, they don't get your movies and purchase music. That that that that dies with you, gay. That is so cool. What a turn. Yeah, I know, right ? If you my dad's Earth Wind and Fire album, I gotta rebuy that. Yeah, you gotta you gotta go get that extra. That's wild. Yeah, uh but the uh but the um but I look just go set it up and write it down right now. Pause the podcast. But honestly everybody should should set this up. And yeah um that it it's something that you really need to think about. Uh, one password, our sponsor . Um, they have one password family's emergency access. They've got a similar feature. And I think that's really key because with Apple, they don't give you access to the keychain as part of that um deceased family member account. So if you're using one password, set that up as well. The other thing I did is frankly, in my wife's OnePassword account, I put David's OnePassword password in her OnePassword account. So yes, she can go see it and she knows it's there. I've shown her how to get around it. Um again, this is fodder for another show, but my last point on this would be: if you're a nerd listening to this, find a fellow nerd that you can say, hey, if something happens to me, will you show her around this stuff? You know, and um you know, find uh uh someone to help her out. But but yeah, uh the photos element of this is probably the most important and you can go a long way towards helping out your descendants if you just turn on Apple Digital Legacy Contact. It takes 10 minutes. Absolutely. I also print out my one password like emergency access sheet and put that in the safe. Yeah. Uh which one password lets you do. But you have had this link in this Notion document. I I need to make sure we hit it because I don't know what it is. It just says Swedish Death Cleaning. Yeah. What in the world, David? Uh this lady wrote this book about Swedish death cleaning. In in Sweden, they have a a practice as you get older that you clean out your your garbage and the stuff of your life. And the idea is when you die, your kids don't have to clean up all your mess. And um, I like the idea, you know. Um, and I'm getting of a certain age, I'm starting to think about it, right? Um, but the uh but I think that also applies to your digital mess. So like why not clean out your digital files so if you pass and they need to get to something they can actually find what they need and not have to look through a hundred thousand photos Wow, that the gentle art of Swedish death cleaning. I've never such a gentle yet ominous title. Well a lot of cultures have a practice of of that nature where as you get older you you slim down your stuff. And I think it's it's really good. Yeah, and especially I think, you know h,opefully I'm a a long wayway, but I do think there's so much in my brain that I just know where things are and if someone were to have to figure that all out, I'm not sure I've left a good map. And so I do need to try and uh figure out how to put that into writing or words or something where it would be uh translatable uh to someone who needs to like follow along . So when it comes to photo libr aries, one library or multiple libraries? For me, one. I think simple is better. Same. I don't uh I don't mess around with multiple libraries. Yeah. Although like before what you used to do professionally, I could see you having multiples. That would make sense. And I definitely did. Like for my travel company, I kept that separate than mine, which also created a issue because I had like aperture and a library there, and I never like migrated those. So it's on that Drobo that I don't know if it works anymore. But I have the final photos, like the big the good ones in my photo library. But all right. File format H E I F or Heath or J JPEG? I'm I'm a Heath by default. Yeah, me too.. I just heaf Although I find it annoying when I deal with a website that doesn't read heath files. Um I have a quick action that just converts it to JPEG. So you right-click on it, hit quick action, you're good. Uh I find myself using that more often than I'd like to. I do the same thing for WebP and Heath and Heek, where if I drag any of those file formats on my desktop, Hazel runs a script and it just could converted to a JPEG.. Yeah Live photos? Do you do live photos? Yeah, uh, not as much as I used to. I like to have it turned on when I'm around kids, because kids say the darnest things. Yeah. But the uh but I I don't use it as much as I used to but I think it's nice. How about you? I keep it on by default. Again I don't typically go back and look at the live aspect of the photo but every once in a while it's nice. And we do go to the beach being in Florida uh semi often and a live photo as a wallpaper, which you can actually see the motion on the lock screen, it's pretty nice. I like that. And have you played with that feature? I know we're not talking about editing, but where you can loop live photos and like do cool features with them, forward, backward and all that stuff. I've done the long exposures. Yeah, that's nice. Which is fun. Waterfall, you know. Yeah, waterfall, like fourth of July. I'll try to do some long exposures or whatever. Yeah. Uh and those can be fun. Honestly, my kids are better at it than I am. Cause I'll like I'll take a live photo and like, how do I make this a thing again? And my kids are like, oh daddy, I go to this. I was like, all right, all right, you guys are pros. Uh so backup outside of Apple. I'm using Google Photos. And right now you're not you're not? Backblaze really and then many backups. Many backups outside of Apple. But the um but I think I'm gonna be switching over to Google Photos too. Yeah yeah and mine mine right now has an hour and forty six minutes left and then all my photos will be backed up yeah to a Google Photos. And uh is do you is this something that you put in here the one Apple setting you wish you'd flip years a go? I might have put that in there. I've been working on this for a while. I don't remember. Oh, okay. But the uh I um I I do like have some settings on capture that I like. Like I put the grid on, the two by three grid, uh just to remind me when I'm taking a picture to frame it properly. Like that's not on by default, and I wish I had put that on. Interesting. Yeah, I don't I don't do the grid. Uh do you have a photographic style set by the way? No, I don't. I don't. I do a photographic style like Austin Mann, photographer. I think he's been a guest on this show in the past too. Yeah. Yeah. Um he has a photographic style that he uses which makes photos just slightly more warm than the default. And so I just do his settings and I just leave it like that. Yeah. That's a good idea. It's a good idea. Sure. We gotta get Austin back here. All right. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. We're the Mac PowerUsers. You can find us at relay.fm/slash MPU. Go there for feedback and membership. We'd love to have you join the more power users community, where we have been doing those bonus episodes. We just dropped one on home Kit where we shared on screen some of the stuff we're doing with HomeKit. Steven gave me some more tips as I've been digging deeper and improving my home kit, and I have a tale of woe with my failed home kit that I had to uh to nuke and pave. But that was a great episode. So check that out if you're a more power user. If not, go check it out once again at rela y.fm slash mpu . Thank you to our sponsors today, one password and ecam. Today for the more power u ser segment, I'm going to be talking about how I rebuilt the family tree in 30 minutes on Mother's Day with AI. It's a great story. We'll see you next time.