The iPhone does a great job of taking pictures, so much so that I am using my Nikon DSLR camera less and less. And the iPad is fantastic for reviewing your pictures. But to get the most of iPhone and iPad photography, you should know all of the ins-and-outs of using the Photos app. A year ago, Jason Snell of Six Colors (who has been reporting on Apple technology since the 1990s) released an e-book called Take Control of Photos, and I gave it a very positive review. The Photos app got some pretty major improvements this year in iOS 13 and iPad OS 13, so Snell re-wrote his book and recently released Take Control of Photos, 2nd Edition. I was provided with a free copy for review purposes, and I read it cover-to-cover this past weekend. It’s a great book.
Although the first edition of this book was primarily aimed at the Mac but also included a lot of info for iPhone and iPad users, this edition treats all platforms equally. In many cases, you can do the same thing on all three. But sometimes, a feature has a different name on the Mac than it does on the iPhone/iPad, some features are only available on the Mac, and some features are only available on iPhone/iPad. Given how many years Photos has been available on all three platforms, I’m a little surprised that the app isn’t yet the same on all platforms, but it was nice to read this book to confirm that certain features are missing just so that I didn’t go crazy looking for it.
Here’s a quick example. There is a new feature on the iPhone/iPad for cropping photos. In addition to a traditional crop, the book reveals that on the iPhone/iPad — but not the Mac — you can also now skew an image horizontally or vertically.
One way that I use this is when I’m attending a CLE and I see a slide that I want to take a picture of. Unless I am sitting dead-center in the middle of the room, the slide is going to be at an angle:
But using the new crop and skew feature, I can make one side of the picture larger or smaller so that I have not only cropped in from the four sides but I have also made all four sides of the slide even.
It’s a complete mystery to me why this useful feature is not available on the Mac, and I had been looking for it until this book confirmed that it just isn’t there. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true. A very useful feature in the Mac version of Photos is the Retouch tool, which can fix a small error like a skin blemish or dust. For some reason, this useful tool does not exist on the iPhone/iPad. However, in this book, Snell explains how you can use the $4.99 app Pixelmator Photo on the iPhone/iPad to do the same thing, and then return the photo back to the Photos app for additional edits.
Just like the first edition of this book, the book is easy to read and is full of photos so it is easy to follow along. The book comprehensively covers virtually all of the features of Photos, and does so in a way that makes it very clear how each feature works. If I wanted to help a grandparent to use the Photos app, I wouldn’t hesitate to give them this book. If you consider yourself a power user of the Photos app, then you won’t get as much out of this book, although that’s how I would describe myself and I still picked up lots of useful tidbits when I read this book over the weekend.
Thanks to Snell for updating his book to include all of the new features of iOS 13 and to place an even greater emphasis on the iPhone and iPad. It’s a great resource, sort of like the users guide for Photos that Apple never released. If you purchased the first edition of this book, you can upgrade to the new edition for only $5. Otherwise, the book costs $15, and it is definitely worth it at that price. When you purchase the book, you can download it in three different formats — PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle) — so you can read the book however you like. Reading the PDF version on my iPad was a great experience.
Click here to get Take Control of Photos, 2nd Edition, by Jason Snell ($14.99)