My previous manual organisation of digital photos into directories on my home server was quite time consuming. I got an iPhone a few years ago and started using Apple Photos. Like you, I put no effort into organising the photos – other than adding some descriptive metadata to a few photos. Apple’s organisation and their user interface allow me to quickly find any photo that I remember taking. However, I’m curious about what you mean by “didn’t use the software effectively”.
Off Topic: one other thing I really like about Apple Photos is that I get to see my photos on the Apple TV when screensaver kicks in.
> However, I’m curious about what you mean by “didn’t use the software effectively”.
Specifically, Photos has facial recognition and has had it since iPhoto ‘09. Instead of using this to do the work for them, they manually scrolled through thousands of thumbnails looking for a certain face. When I mentioned I used the facial recognition feature, the others said they didn’t enable it and were fine scrolling for hours.
The software has different tools for different jobs. In this case, the facial recognition was the efficient way to cull down thousands of random photos to something manageable, but they weren’t interested.
Similarly, I constantly use the map view to find pictures from a trip, or that I know were taken around a certain location. People have seen me use it, they’ve asked and I’ve explained it to them, and yet they never seem to commit it to memory to use it for themselves.
I’ve also spoken to people who talked about scrolling through their pictures to delete old screenshots. There is a Utility filter to view just the screenshot. A few minutes looking around the app and it’s right there, but I see people scrolling their whole library.
All of this is not using the software effectively or efficiently.
The facial recognition has been enabled by default since I started using an iPhone in 2020. I find it to be useful but not as useful as the map view: as a bird-watcher and wildlife enthusiast, I’ll remember where (but not necessarily when) I took interesting photos. The geo-tagging also makes it easy to delete old work-related photos of computers from my workplace.
I’m generally considered by peers to be somewhat paranoid when it comes to computer/mobile privacy and big ad/tech but I find these features to be very useful and I’m surprised your peers wouldn’t make use of them when they’re available – particularly when the software is so intuitive.
Off Topic: one other thing I really like about Apple Photos is that I get to see my photos on the Apple TV when screensaver kicks in.