Take Control of
Your Digital Photos

What’s New in the Third Edition

When I wrote the first edition of this book, the number of photo apps available was relatively small and a few major players dominated the category. The second edition, released in 2019, included several changes to account for many more applications and approaches for managing photos. Now, this third edition incorporates a whole slew of updates due to how the field has expanded.

Oh, and have you heard of this new thing called AI? Although generative AI is getting all the press for creating photorealistic images out of a few lines of text, machine learning (ML) technologies are also being employed for organizing, such as auto-tagging images in a library or allowing searches based on ML-based recognized objects.

Here’s how these changes are reflected in this edition:

• Workflow management: To help visualize the options you need to consider when choosing apps, I wrote an entirely new chapter, “Choose a Photo Management Workflow.”
• Geotagging: I added “Geotag with Help from an App” to help you while you’re out making photos so location data gets added to images.
• Machine learning for keywords: A lot of people get hung up applying keywords when organizing their photos. But now machine learning can help by generating them for you. I added the app ON1 Photo Keyword AI to the options in “Import Your Photos the Smart Way.” That turned out to be a tease for a larger discussion of using ML apps like ON1 Photo Keyword AI and Excire Foto to create keywords and other data in a new section called “Scan for Metadata.”
• Photos scans for duplicates: The Photos for macOS app finally has a built-in way to scan for duplicates!
• Added AI/ML explanations: All this talk of artificial intelligence and machine learning is no doubt making experts in those fields grind their teeth because people often use the terms incorrectly. I wrote a new sidebar to clear things up: “AI and ML Terminology.”
• Memories changes: I updated the section “AI in Photos for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS” to account for new ways that Photos handles the Memories feature.
• Managing multiple libraries: As we accumulate photos (and photo apps), it’s inevitable that they get scattered across various libraries. But we’re looking to take control of our photos, and some new technologies have arisen to help, so I’ve written an entirely new chapter: “Work with Multiple Photo Libraries.”

Other, more minor changes, including some deletions include:

• Google Photos has changed how it works since the last edition, so “AI in Google Photos” has been updated.
• In the last edition, I removed Mylio from the lineup for various reasons. Although I still can’t wholeheartedly endorse it, the new version ticks a lot of boxes. I explain why in the sidebar “Consider Mylio Photos.”
• Apple broke or removed a Siri feature that let you perform searches by saying them for Photos for macOS. At some point the feature just…stopped working, so I’ve removed the explanation.
• Thanks to new and better tools (namely Avalanche from CYME), I retired the chapter on migrating from iPhoto or Aperture to Lightroom Classic.