Back in 2014 and 2015, Apple revamped the way that photos are stored and managed on the iPhone/iPad and the Mac, and at the same time changed the name from “iPhoto” to “Photos.” Around that time, California attorney David Sparks created a Video Field Guide to show and talk through the apps. I reviewed that guide almost exactly five years ago. In the past five years, Apple has made a huge number of changes to Photos, especially in iOS 13. Accordingly, David has spent the last year creating an all-new Second Edition of his Photos Field Guide. The first edition had over two hours of videos. This second edition has over six hours of video, about 128 individual videos. David provided me with a free review copy of this Field Guild as soon as it was released a few days ago, and I enjoyed spending lots of time with it over the long Memorial Day Weekend. It sells for $29, but for a limited time you can purchase for only $24. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most out of the Photos app on their iPhone or iPad. (And if you also use a Mac, the Guide also fully covers the Mac version of Photos.)
The Photos Field Guide is perfect for anyone who appreciates that there are lots of features in the Photos app but who hasn’t taken the significant time to figure all of them out yet. David goes through virtually every feature in the app and for each feature shows how it works and explains why you would want to use the feature — or in some instances, why you are better off not using the feature.
David has created about a dozen video Field Guides, and they are all available at the website learn.macsparky.com. A few of them are even free. Once you purchase the Photos Field Guide, you will be able to click the guide from the main page of that website and start to use it.
The primary way to use the Field Guide is in a web browser. I mostly used the Photos Field Guide in Safari on my iPad, and it worked great. I also used it on a Mac, just a little, to see how it worked there, and that also worked well. All of the chapters are listed on the left. Simply tap on a chapter to have the video play on the right. You can tap a button in the bottom right of the video to have it fill the screen, which is how I watched most of the videos.
The Photos Field Guide includes chapters devoted to every aspect of the app. There are chapters with tips for taking better photos and using all of the features in the Camera app and chapters on recommended accessories such as small tripods that work well with the iPhone. There are chapters for importing photos that you take with another camera, such as a DSLR camera. There are chapters on managing the photos in your library, editing photos, organizing your photos, finding photos (and discovering the ones that you might have forgotten about), and sharing photos. There are also three chapters on working with video.
And those are just the chapters devoted to the iPhone and iPad. There also versions of most of these same chapters devoted to the Photos app on the Mac. And David Sparks points out when there is a function that you currently can only do on the iPhone/iPad but not on the Mac (such as advanced video editing functions) and on the Mac but not on the iPhone/iPad (such as using the retouch tool to remove a blemish). (In the iPhone/iPad chapters, he shows how you can work around that limitation by using third-party apps to remove a blemish from a photo.)
The chapters on finding and managing photos are particularly useful. When I started practicing law in the mid-1990s, a single roll of film on a camera might take my wife and I months to finish. Nowadays, I may take dozens or even hundreds of photos on my iPhone in a single day. With so many more pictures, knowing how to use photo management tools is essential. For example, I love that I can easily tell Photos on my iPad to show me pictures of my daughter, taken in 2012, on the beach, and then I’m instantly looking at those pictures.
The logical way to use the Field Guide is to read the chapters in order, but you don’t have to do it that way. If a particular chapter doesn’t interest you, you can just skip it. Or you can jump around to the chapters that interest you. When you complete a chapter, a checkmark appears next to the chapter name to make it easy to keep track of what you have already watched.
A bar and number at the top left tells you how much of the Field Guide you have completed so far.
What I love about this Field Guide is that David shows you the actual screen of his iPad (or iPhone or Mac) so you can see exactly what he is doing while he explains to you what he is doing. These are not videos in which you see his face talking about the app. The only time I saw a video with David talking to the camera was in the very last chapter at the end of the book, a 29-second video called “Thanks.”
I also like that David shows how to work with the Photos app using his actual Photos app, not some limited mock-up. That way, when he gives tips for managing a lot of photos, you see him doing so with his tens of thousands of photos. Yes, that means that you see a ton of pictures of David’s family and friends, a lot of pictures of Disneyland because he is a fan and it is close to his home, and even some pictures of his very cute puppy.
I will note that there were a very few instances in which I wish that he had used a photo designed to illustrate a particular function instead of just a convenient picture from his own library. For example, when he showed off the powerful vertical and horizontal perspective features, he did so on a photo taken at Disneyland that didn’t even need the adjustment. (For an example of how you might use that feature in real life, look at the two pictures of a PowerPoint slide showing a horse in this post.) But for most of the time, it was helpful to see him using the features with his real photo library because it felt like how I would be using the Photos app with my own, real, library of photos.
There are some settings that you can adjust in the Photos Field Guide, such as changing from 1x play speed to a faster or slower play speed. You can also download individual videos so that you can watch them later without an Internet connection. And to make that easier, at the very end of the Field Guide, David combined all of the chapters in each section of the book into a single video for each section (21 sections total) so that you can easily download a series of chapters devoted to a topic without having to download a dozen individual chapters for each section.
I consider myself a fairly advanced user of the Photos app – I take a ton of pictures (over 50,000 in my Photos library) and frequently edit the pictures either in the Photos app on my iPhone/iPad/Mac or using Photoshop on my Mac or iPad — and I still learned quite a few things from the Photos Field Guide. For example, I found his tips on sharing photos especially useful because David explained the limitations on certain sharing methods that you can avoid using other sharing methods, something I did not fully understand. If you consider yourself an intermediate or beginning user of Photos, then you will find this resource even more valuable.
And I say that from experience. After the first edition of David’s Photos Field Guide came out five years ago, I got a copy for my grandmother. Even though she was in her late 80s, she loved working with her photos on her Mac, and she would tell me how she would watch parts of that Field Guide over and over again until she had figured out how to master each task. Watching a video in which someone shows and explains how to do something is often far more useful than looking at a book, and my grandmother loved learning how to do more with all of the photos that she had accumulated (and scanned) from a lifetime of vacations and family events. My grandmother has now passed away, but I know that if she were still around, the second edition of this Field Guide would have brought a big smile to her face. And because of the work that she did with her digital photos while she was still alive, I love that I can still go through her photos that she organized so well.
Finally, while this guide would be useful at any time, now that we are all spending more time at home as a result of COVID-19, this is a perfect opportunity to find some time on a weekend to curl up with your iPad (or Mac) and learn from the Photos Field Guide. You will quickly find yourself doing more with the pictures that you already have, and then in the future, you will do more with your photos than ever before.
Click here to get the Photos Field Guide (2nd Edition) ($24 for a limited time)