Here's How To Complete Your Pictures And More With Apple's Photos App On IPhone

While you may love or hate the iPhone’s Photos app, this is where all your photos end up either way. With the capabilities of iCloud, it’s an easy way to keep track of your images in your Apple ecosystem. As the iPhone’s camera continues to make a name for itself, professional and amateur photographers alike keep creeping back to Apple to capture their memories.

Here’s a guide to help you better understand your iPhone’s Photos app.

It’s All In Your ‘Library’

When in your library, you can view your images by years, months, or days. If you want to see everything in your library, you can select “All Photos”. As someone who doesn’t keep many photos, I find it easier to see all of my images that way.

Within the app, there are countless ways to customize your experience. Select an image and go to the share button in the lower left corner. Scroll down and you’ll find a long list of actions. Here you can hide an image, create a slideshow, AirPlay to another device, create a watch face, or even print. You can take more specific actions like adjust the date, time, or location of the image, or assign it to one of your contacts. With so much to do in the app, it establishes less need to use other photo apps.

Pro Tip: Do you know about the three-finger method to cut, copy or paste photos on your iPhone?

Relive nostalgia under ‘For You’

See Your Year in Select Memories and Reviews in the ‘For You’ tab. You can customize your memories by calling them something else or even less characteristic of a specific person. At the bottom, you’ll find photos shared with you from other iOS users. It will look something like, “From [insert contact name],

Organize with ‘album’

Albums are a good way to organize your images by subject, image type, etc. To create an album, select the plus sign in the top left corner of the screen. You can either create a new album, create a new folder, or create an album to share with other iPhone users. To delete an album, go to the Albums tab at the bottom and select “Edit” in the upper-right corner of the screen. A red minus sign will appear at the corner of each album. Next to any album you want to delete, tap the minus.

Here's how to complete your pictures and more with Apple's Photos app on iPhone

people and places

The app uses facial recognition to keep track of who’s in your photos. The cool thing is that you can tap someone’s image and you can see all your photos with them in one place. You can assign a contact to their profile or give them a special name.

The Location feature captures the geographic location of your photos (that are taken on your phone). There’s even a map where you can scroll to see where specific pictures were taken.

media type

Media Types divides your image library into categories. For example, I can see that I have eight videos, 24 selfies, 11 photos taken in live mode, four photos taken in portrait mode, and 12 screenshots. This would be especially useful for people who have large libraries looking for specific image types. This takes the hassle out of scrolling through massive amounts of photos, especially if you can’t remember exactly what you’re looking for.

utilities

Under Utilities, you’ll find images that were airdropped for you, under ‘Import’. You can also find any hidden photos and recently deleted photos. It will take up to 40 days for photos and videos to be permanently removed from Photos under ‘Recently Deleted’.

‘Search’ through your collection

Search is like your in-app Google where you can type to find photos with specific places, people, categories, etc. Plus, at the bottom of the search bar, you just tap on a spot to find all of your images. Your Recently Searched will keep track of your search history in case you don’t want to forget the photos you were looking for earlier.