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Tag: Apple Photos app

June 1, 2025

Four Ways to Showcase your Best Family Photos on your Phone

Are you able to call up any family photo you want on your smartphone? If not, it may be time to update your photo-archiving plan. Here’s what I did.

Our teenage son asked me a question during dinner last week that I had a difficult time answering. He asked if I could show him some pictures from when he was younger. Pictures of when he was younger?! 

I had thousands of photos… tens of thousands from the past fifteen years! But where were they? Could I immediately call up any of these pictures that best represented his earlier years? 

Could I Meet the Moment?
Sure, I could flip though endless photos living in my iPhone. But that would take too long. I started sweating. 

For years, I’d been dutifully curating my family’s photos on my Mac using Adobe Lightroom Classic, but when I received this simple photo request, I wasn’t ready for it.

I took a breath. He kept eating. The opportunity was about to pass. Then, I pulled out my iPhone, opened Apple’s Photos app and quickly went… to my shared albums.

A Shared Photo Album Saves the Day
And yes, there it was… the photo album I had created years ago and shared with my wife that collected some of our Lester adventures. I opened it up, pulled up my chair next to my son and began displaying a few fun pictures from his elementary school years. He smiled, and after a few minutes, we agreed to look at more another time.

After he left, I exhaled. 

Whoa! That was a definite dad moment. And I almost blew it.

Set Up Cloud-Based Photo Albums with Easy Mobile Access
Afterwards, I thought about our exchange and wondered why I had been caught so off guard with this simple request. I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on our family photos over the years. My challenge was more about my phone having easy access to my curated photos from my multiple cameras. 

So, I decided it was time for a little review of my existing photo archiving process and how to give myself better mobile access.   

The obvious way to handle this need is to create cloud-based photos folders/galleries that you can easily view with phone apps. There are plenty of way to do this. But you’ve just got to maintain your plan and keep your albums up to date.

#1
Apple’s Photos App
For an iPhone user, Apple’s Photos app is the built-in solution. The only limitation to shared albums is the pictures are organized in the order you load them in, not in the chronological order of the photos’ time stamp.

A regular (non-shared) album that you set up just for yourself to sync with your iPhone will order the photos in the correct time sequence.

#2
Amazon Photos
Back in 2019, I started using Amazon Photos for my cloud photo archive. The big draw was it was free with unlimited storage of full-res photos… included in the cost of my Amazon Prime membership.

It has an app for my iPhone, and yes, I use it (though I didn’t have a photo album set up with my son’s pics).

The one problem with Amazon Photos is I do worry that one day, Amazon will abandon its interest in photos. And then… poof?

#3
SmugMug
So, I looked for a company with a more photo-centric raison d’être. And I decided to go with SmugMug. I’ve been curating my best photos with this platform across the past few years. 

Also with unlimited, full-res photo uploads, SmugMug has become the platform for my official family archive. But I’m being very ‘precious’ about which photos live there. I think about my SmugMug galleries as an archive that will be handed to the next generation. And I do pay $200+/year to maintain this current strategy.

Yes, of course, I have photos of my son in my SmugMug account, and yes, I have the SmugMug app on my iPhone for immediate access. But I’ve intentionally restricted the photos of my son to ones that more reflect his life’s milestones for future generations to see. (I’m still fine tuning this theoretical goal.)

So, SmugMug is missing a bunch of the fun photos that I’d otherwise want to share with my son today.

#4
Lightroom’s Mobile App
And then it hit me… All the above solutions require me to export selected, edited photos out of Adobe Lightroom Classic’s ecosystem. 

What I had missed was never setting up a syncing solution directly to Lightroom’s Mobile app. I suddenly realized that was the obvious hole in my photo-archiving plan. 

Oops. 

Of course, I already have a great photo collection of our son in Lightroom Classic. So, I loaded the Lightroom app onto my iPhone. Then, with one click, I synced the collection to my iPhone. 

Well, that was an easy fix.

I’m now prepared for my next dinner with my son.

Don’t Fall Behind
It’s important to never let up on any photo archiving strategy. You can see I’ve worked with several solutions over the years. (Part of that is intentional to help protect against unexpected digital-file loss.)

Good photo organization takes a life-long commitment.

If you can’t immediately access the photo you want on your phone, it’s a clue there’s more work to do.

Is your phone ready for your next dinner?

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June 6, 2021

How to Use Apple’s Photos App to Quickly Create a Memory Movie

If you need a way to display a group of photos in a movie-like presentation, Apple’s Photos app can do this trick for you. Here’s how.

Apple’s Photos app on a Mac contains the powerful functionality to organize your pictures into collections and then display them as “Memory Movies,” complete with photo zooms and transitions. The app does this on its own to generate unexpected and often delightful photo-montage movies from your photo archive.

But you can also put the Photos app to work to create a Memory Movie using your own (human-directed) collection of pictures.

It’s simple to do, and with a couple of clicks, you can also add music and a title graphic.

How to Make a Memory Movie
The trick to quickly creating a Memory Movie is choosing one of your existing albums of photos. But it’s also not hard to create a new album for this use. The bottom line is the album feeds your movie structure.

Once you’re in your album, you’ll see the option on top to click on “Show as Memory” or “Slideshow.” (The difference is Slideshow doesn’t contain the photo moves and zooms.)

On the next page that appears, you’ll see your Movie Memory ready to start.
Click the play icon.

That’s it!

To adjust your music choices, click on the tools icon on the right side of the playback controls.

Fast and Good Enough
Once you understand the easy steps to creating a Memory Movie, you can pull one together in minutes by using one of your existing albums.

It’s a much faster process than importing your photos into a video editing program and then manually setting up all of the photo transitions before exporting your video file.

Sure, a manually-edited version would be more creatively precise. (AI-directed photo moves and transitions can sometimes be a bit off balance.) But I’d say for most uses, letting your computer do the work is just fine.

A Memory Movie is also an especially simple way to quickly pull together and share a collection of photos for a Zoom meeting.

A couple caveats: You can’t create a Memory Movie using a shared album. It needs to be one that lives locally on your Mac. And you can’t actually export your Memory Movie into a separate file. The movie experience is generated and remains within the Photos app.

Display your Memories
There are any number of ways to display digital photos these days. But if you’re already using the Photos app for your photo management, this quick and easy presentation trick is a no-brainer.

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