Take Control of Your Digital Photos, Third Edition

Build a stress-free workflow to import, rate, tag, and organize your digital photos!

Version 3.0, updated August 28, 2023

This book gives you the information you need to build and maintain a digital photo workflow that makes it easy to import, rate, tag, and store photos to find them quickly and easily later. It helps you spend more time on the enjoyable aspects of photography—capturing and viewing your photos—and less on the mundane but essential task of managing all your photos. It also puts you in the best position to quickly find and edit your most promising photos.

Are you drowning in a sea of digital photos? Unable to find the shots you’re looking for, or to stay on top of managing all the photos you’re taking? Digital photography expert Jeff Carlson gives you a plan for tackling this problem, starting with preparing your camera ahead of time, then choosing the right app to manage your photos, judging and organizing your photos, and backing up your photos for safekeeping.

In this book, Jeff offers advice to cover both macOS and Windows (along with limited coverage of mobile platforms), and to address a broad range of photo management apps, including Apple Photos, Capture One, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom desktop, Excire Foto, Exposure X7, Mylio Photos, ON1 Photo Keyword AI, and ON1 Photo RAW.

With this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Get started with the minimum amount of work: Take advantage of software intelligence to do some of the categorizing work for you, and find out how you can accomplish some tasks even if you have little time.

• Prep your camera: Learn four actions you can take before you head out the door that will make things easier after you return with new pictures.

• Manage your workflow: Choose the software and approach that best meets your needs for organizing your photos.

• Import the right way: Learn how to assign valuable metadata to all images that come in during the import stage, saving lots of time and effort.

• Pick winners and losers: Assign ratings to your photos, and remove or hide unwanted photos.

• Remove duplicates: Use Lightroom Classic, Photos for macOS, or Gemini Photos for iOS/iPadOS to find and delete duplicate images.

• Use AI/Machine Learning: Learn about AI/ML terminology, and use software tools like ON1 Photo Keyword AI and Excire Foto to apply keywords automatically.

• Apply keywords and metadata: If needed, manually apply keywords to individual shots, learn how to apply geotags using location data from external devices (like an iPhone), and use facial recognition to collect shots of specific friends and family members.

• Search with smart albums: Build smart albums whose contents change depending on criteria you’ve specified, allowing you to find photos more easily, even in images you add in the future.

• Manage multiple libraries: Use Photos for macOS, Lightroom Classic, or Peakto to manage multiple photo libraries.

• Go mobile: Find the right online service for making your photos available on mobile devices, based on your needs and which desktop photo management app you use.

• Protect your photos: Learn how to implement a backup strategy that will preserve all your data, not just your photos, and how to archive photos for the future.