1150 – Get Your Photos Under Control: Tom talks Photo Management For Beginners

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

This episode is a practical beginner's guide to organizing and finding photos on an iPhone. Tom explains how Apple's Photos app is structured and shares simple habits that make managing thousands of photos much easier over time.
Key Points
• Understand the two main sections:
o Library = every photo, video, screenshot, and image you've ever saved.
o Collections = Apple automatically organizes your library into useful categories.
• Use Search extensively:
o Search by words appearing inside photos (OCR).
o Search by month, date, location, or object.
o Makes finding old photos dramatically easier.
• Build good habits immediately:
o Mark your best photos with the Heart (Favorite).
o Delete poor or duplicate shots while they're fresh.
o Deleted photos remain recoverable for 30 days.
• Useful Collections features:
o Utilities: Find duplicates, favorites, receipts, handwriting, hidden photos, and recently deleted items.
o Albums: Create your own custom folders for specific topics or projects.
o People & Pets: Name individuals (and pets) so all their photos can be found instantly.
o Recents: Quickly locate recently taken photos.
o Shared Albums: Share selected photos with others without consuming iCloud storage.
o Trips & Maps: Organize photos by travel location if Location Services were enabled.
o Media Types: Filter by selfies, videos, portraits, panoramas, Live Photos, and more.
o Pinned Collections: Keep your most frequently used collections at the top.
• Library navigation tips:
o Pinch to zoom in or out to change thumbnail size.
o Jump directly to photos from a particular year.
o Tapping Library returns you to your newest photos instantly.
Key Takeaway
If you consistently favorite your best photos, delete unwanted ones, use Search instead of scrolling, and take advantage of Collections, managing even tens of thousands of photos becomes far easier. The episode focuses on building simple habits that prevent photo libraries from becoming overwhelming.

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Episode 1150 – Photo Management For Beginners
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:22] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1150 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about photo management. And this is something that's just driven me crazy for years, and I'm finally getting a handle on it after all these years. I've got tens of thousands of photos to deal with and videos and everything. So I decided to dig in a little bit more and learn how to do it myself. And it takes a while when you've done it. When you left thousands of photos. unmanaged, right, but I'm getting a better handle over it than the past month or so. I hope you didn't miss episode 1149. That was the software and software as a service that I've been using. There's about 42 of them. You don't have to have all of them, but it'll give you an idea of some things you may not have heard of that could help you in your business. All right, pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 4.0 is in the final proofreading stages and fixing up typos and things like that. So watch for that shortly. But you can go ahead and download 3.0 because 4.0 adds to it. So screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And then on the, the back episodes like 1149 for software and software as a service, you go to screwthecommute.com/the episode number. That was 1149 and today is 1150. I think you're going to want to listen to a couple times and practice with your phone and so forth. Now, for you Android users, you're going to be able to do a lot of this stuff. It's just that I don't have an Android, so I'm going to be talking about iPhone, but most of the stuff you can search out, if you get the right idea, then you can just go search YouTube or something on how to do it on a Android. Okay, one other thing, make sure you go check out our podcast Masterclass. It's free on YouTube, but you can get to it from screwthecommute.com/pod. And the first half is how to be a super great guest on podcast, which you can start immediately. And the second half is all the tips and tricks on having your own podcast. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/pod.
[00:02:52] All right, let's get into photo management. Uh, and again, I'm talking about iPhones, but there's similar stuff on androids. All right. So the first thing you got to get a handle on is you open your photos app and it's divvied up into two major categories. At the bottom of the screen is usually at the bottom. When you're listening to this, you'll see library and collections, two different icons. Your library is everything you've ever taken in your life on that phone or previous phones, because it carries over when you switch phones and stuff, videos, screenshots, everything on earth pictures, selfies, everything. Now the collections button. All right. That's the one we're going to talk about today in that the collections button is Apple has divvied up your library on your behalf. Now, did they do it perfectly? Probably not, but I'm. I'm gonna ask you to go into your collections part and start learning about it. I'm going to teach you a little bit about it here, but yours will be different than mine because, for instance, you can make an album. Well, the albums I make aren't going to be the same as what you make things like that. It has a trips function where it, you know, looks where you were and puts all those pictures in that particular trip. Well, mine's going to be different than yours. All right. So and by the way, with that function, before I forget, you have to have your location thing turned on in your iPhone. So make sure that's on. Okay, so that's the two big divisions. Library and collections. Library is everything. Collections is divvied up automatically for you, but then you can customize it somewhat. We're going to talk about that now there's I'm going to give you some pro tips as we go. So here's an interesting one. Once you open your photos app, there's a search function in it. And so you can actually search for any text that might appear in one of your pictures if you have 10,000 pictures.
[00:05:22] And so you can search for a specific word. Let's say you were looking for that time when you stopped at Welcome to Tennessee sign or something. All right, you can hit this. Open the photos app, hit the search function, type in the word Tennessee, and it'll pull up every picture that you have that has Tennessee in the in the picture somewhere. It's just crazy that things will do. You can search for any pictures you took in July of any year. Okay, you can put the full date or just. I know I took a picture last July and I can't remember and then boom, it'll bring up all the ones. So use the search function in your photo app and it'll find stuff that you couldn't believe that you forgot about years ago. Or, you know, let's say you had an invoice on my Chevy Suburban. The Chevrolet gave me, well, I could type in Chevrolet or Suburban, and if I took a picture of that invoice, it's going to come up. So that's a cool pro tip and get in the habit. This is another kind of pro tip from now to eternity to start. Harding. When you click the heart button, that means you like or that's your favorite. So start doing that immediately because you just dig up hundreds of pictures over weeks or months and, you know, then you got eight pictures and one is really good, but you got to look through the nine bad ones or the the seven bad ones to find the good one. So start getting in the habit of looking at your pictures right away. If you really like one, hard it and the other ones delete. Now even if you delete them in a hurry, you got 30 days on recently deleted to change your mind on it, but it's going to start making your photo stuff much more compact and mostly good stuff instead of loads of bad stuff. And then a few good stuffs. Okay, so get in that habit. All right, so now we're going to go in. You're in the photo app and you've typed collections. We're going to go through the type of collections that are there automatically.
[00:07:41] And they could be in different order on your phone, but they're there if you have the latest version of iOS. So let's talk about the first one called utilities. This is a good way to clean up space on your thing because it has a section called duplicates. So you can type or go in and click on utilities. And then there's a bunch of different things in there. You click on duplicates and it'll bring up every duplicate photo and video that you got. And then you can just click merge and it'll kill the the lowest resolution one. So you always keep the best quality one. So that's a good thing to use. Now also in that section you have favorites. So if you want to pull up all your favorites at once, you can hit that button. And anything that you have put a heart thing on will come up. It'll also do even receipts. So if you took a picture of a receipt you got from Walmart, it can somehow recognize it and pull all your receipts up. Illustrations. This is all under utilities in the collections. Illustrations that stuff that's you know, made by, you know, graphs and things like that handwriting. It'll even pick up things that there's any kind of handwriting in the photo, it'll pull it up. And also you have hidden, if you don't want certain pictures to be seen when you're scrolling through stuff, especially if you're showing other people stuff and you got personal stuff, you all your hidden will be there. And then that's also where you, you're recently deleted will be there, which will hold them for 30 days. So that's just the utility section of the collections button. Okay, so here's some other ones. Now albums, these are the ones that you can make an album, name it whatever you want and put pictures in it and customize it. That's one that you can totally is under your control. So that's albums and you just hit the plus button and it'll say, okay, what do you want to name the album? You name it, and then you can go through your photos and put them all in in that particular album that apply to it.
[00:09:56] So if I had an album for protection dogs, then I make a Protection Dogs album, hit the plus sign protection dogs, and then it starts going through all my pictures and I put Tuck and Rubik's and all these pictures. I have protection dogs in that album. All right, next one is featured. Now that's a one you don't probably not going to use much because you can't customize it. And it kind of it's just kind of thinks which are the most important things for you. I don't know how it figures it out, but you can't customize it. And there's other ways to see pictures that are important to you. So don't use that one much. Now, one that you probably will use a lot is people and pets. So when you go in there, you'll see where people are, and you can hold your finger on them and give them a name of that person. And then if you want to pull up all the pictures of that person, you can do so. And you can make groups in there where if you have your husband or wife and your child in a picture, it'll pull up all those pictures at once. If the child is named and the husband or wife is named, then it'll pull up all those. So very handy. And then pets, it'll pull up. Now I think it'll only do dogs and cats right now. All right. But if you have, if you want to put them all in one place, you just name them. And then when you want to pull them all up, boom, there they are. All your certain dogs, cats, whatever say. So that's the people and pets section, and you'll probably use that a lot. Uh, recent ones are handy if you say, oh, I took a picture this week and I don't want to search through hundreds of pictures to find it. You can go to your library and it'll be near the top or bottom, whichever you have it, you know, laid out. But recents are going to say, okay, Tuesday, here's all the pictures you took on Tuesday of last week. Okay, so that's good. Now you also have a thing called shared albums, which you can designate someone else that has an iPhone.
[00:12:07] This is easy. You can do it with Android people, but there's a bunch of hoops to jump through. I don't even know how to do it, but that way, if you had somebody in your life that you wanted to, all the pictures that you want to put in, that shared album, they can see on their phone and they can put, you can pick and choose who can put what where, but usually they'll put pictures in their phone and put it in their shared album and it comes over to you see. So, so that's handy. And one thing nice about that one is that it doesn't go against the amount of storage you have in your iCloud. So it doesn't count at all. You could put hundreds and hundreds of photos and videos in there and it doesn't count against you. Okay. Let's see trips. So if you have your location turned on, it'll bring up all the places that you were. And you also has a maps function where if you click the map, it'll show you how many photos you took in different places. And if you hold your finger on it, it'll pull all those pictures up from different places. So you can, you can either find it in trips or maps when you've traveled and taken pictures. As long as your location is turned on media types, you might say, hey, I want to bring up selfies that I've taken so you can bring up selfies. There's six different ones you can pull up under media types, selfies, videos, portraits, long exposures, you know, if you're trying to get fancy with your camera, you know, with pretty pictures, long exposures, panoramas, those are the real super wide ones. And Live Photos are the ones that I think take a picture. You know, it's a moving picture one second to one second after your photo, something like that. I don't use that too much. So you can say, oh, I know I took a selfie. So it cuts out everything but selfies. And then you can pick the ones you want. And then the pinned section is where you can tell it, hey, these are the most important ones. Take them to the top.
[00:14:16] So that's your pinned. And then it has another one that you, I don't think you can adjust it too much called memories where it just picks things that it thinks are important to you as a memory. I don't use that one much either. Sometimes it it just comes up and some of these you can hit a button on the side and it makes a slideshow out of it. You know, you sit there and watch. I think memories is one of those where you could hit the button and it'll play a slideshow for you like a video. So. So that's a beginner's thing to your photo. I'm just telling you, go in there and like I said, the library is one thing. Now, if you do happen to be scrolling through your library, there's a couple of things you should know. You can squinch your fingers big or close, and either make all the pictures bigger so there's one per screen or couple per screen, or you can squeeze it so tight that it's like a years, years, and years worth of pictures. Uh, and you can scroll down to a certain year, which a lot of times you can just look at the top of the screen and click on what year you're looking for, and it'll go to all the pictures for that year. So that's your library. And if you do happen to scroll a bunch up on your library and you want to scroll, you don't have to scroll back. You can just hit the library button and it'll take you right to the recent ones. Again, so so there's a whole bunch of tips there for you. And that's just the beginner stuff. Okay. I think next week I'll do one, going deeper on some of these things. But, yeah, if you get a hold of this, you'll, you'll be able to find the photos you want a lot easier and you won't be wearing your finger out scrolling forever and then wondering where it is when you want to find it again. So, so there you go. But anyway, one thing. Start putting hearts on your favorites and deleting the bad ones from now on and things will get easier as you go.
[00:16:12] All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. And it's certified to operate by SCHEV. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.