As a professional photo organizer, I’m always most interested in the changes that make it easier to organize, find and actually USE the photos on your phone. Here are the iOS 27 Photos changes I think you should know about.

iOS 27 Photos Updates

Shared Albums are finally full resolution!

This is a BIG one! It’s always irked me that iCloud Shared Albums reduced the resolution of anything you added (not enough to stop using them, but still annoying). In other words, someone’s photo you saved from your Shared Album wasn’t necessarily the same full-quality file sitting in their Library.

With iOS 27, Shared Albums now support full-resolution photos and videos! Hooray!

There is rumor that this will end the loophole where Shared Albums did not count toward your iCloud storage, but that remains to be seen.

You can rate photos 1–5 stars.

You can now give photos a rating from one to five stars. If you’ve used photo management software like Adobe Lightroom in the past, star ratings may already be familiar to you. They give you another way to identify and sort your best photos.

But do you NEED to start rating every photo in your camera roll? Absolutely not. Personally, I still think the simple Favorite button is enough for most people. I use Favorites to quickly identify the photos I love and want to find again.

But I can see star ratings being useful when you’re working on a specific project. Maybe five stars are the absolute BEST photos you want in your family yearbook, four stars are strong contenders and three stars are backups. Or perhaps you’re sorting through hundreds of photos from a vacation and want a little more nuance than Favorite/Not Favorite.

It’s another tool in your organizing toolbox. Use it if it makes your life easier. Ignore it if it makes organizing your photos feel like more work!

You can add keywords to your photos.

Keywords have existed in the Mac Photos app for a long time, but with iOS 27, you can finally add them right from your iPhone. Apple has also made keywords searchable on the iPhone.

So… how is a keyword different than the caption option we’ve had for awhile?

A caption is a description of a photo. You might write something like, “Paint Color: Sherwin Williams Retreat”

A keyword is a label or tag that you would use repeatedly on several photos. For that same photo, your keywords might be “family history”, “school” or “scanned photo”.

Again, I don’t think you need to start adding keywords to every photo in your Library. Apple Photos is already VERY good at searching the actual contents of your photos. You can search for things like “dog in snow,” “birthday cake,” or “beach” without manually tagging anything.

But keywords can be helpful for things Apple can’t automatically identify. For example, you could “Christmas card” for contenders for this year’s card (though I use Albums for this purpose instead).

You can save a still photo from a video.

FINALLY! Have you ever recorded a video and realized afterward that there was one perfect moment you wish you had captured as a photo?

In the past, I recommended using the free FrameGrab app to pull a high-quality still photo from your video.

But with the iOS 27 Photos updates, you can now do this right inside the Photos app. Open the video, pause it around the moment you want, then tap the three dots in the top right and choose ‘Save Video Frame As Photo.”

Your iPhone will extract that individual frame and save it as a photo in your Library, keeping the date taken intact!

I LOVE this addition because I take a lot of video. Sometimes the best “photo” of a moment is hiding inside a video you already captured, and now you don’t need a separate app to get it.

Overall, I’m excited about the iOS 27 Photos updates.

Last year’s iOS 26 update felt mostly like Apple rearranging the furniture. This year, we’re getting some useful new tools.

My favorites are definitely the full-resolution Shared Albums and the ability to grab a photo from a video. Star ratings and keywords are nice additions too, especially for people who want a little more control over how they organize their photos.

But remember: just because Apple gives you another way to organize your photos doesn’t mean you have to use it.

You do NOT need to rate every photo. You do NOT need to keyword your entire camera roll. You do NOT need to turn photo organizing into a giant project. Use the features that make your photos easier to find and enjoy… and happily ignore the rest!

Want to make your Photos app work better for you?

My new Camera Roll Reboot is a fun, step-by-step guide (fully updated for iOS 27!) that walks you through the settings and features of the Photos App.. so you can take control of your camera roll in under 30 mins! Find your favorite photos faster, clean up some clutter automatically, and feel more confident using the camera roll you already have. No massive organizing project required!

The post ios 27 photos updates appeared first on Miss Freddy.

currently…

settling into a school routine. The kids are both at the same school this year which is making life SO much easier!

working more in my basement office because the dog is finally needing less daytime supervision.

obsessing over Wispr Flow… it’s saving me SO much time replying to messages, DMs, emails and more! It’s SO much better than the built-in dictation on my iPhone and I love using this from my computer as well.

loving the new cooler (I got the white one) that I splurged on prior to hosting my sister’s bridal shower. I can’t wait to use it again and again!

reading The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow.

listening to The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett.

wearing this comfortable tennis skirt on repeat because it’s still so dang hot here.

eating from a new 8 week meal plan I put together with the help of TikTok, the Recipe Notes app, and ChatGPT.

buying heavier dumbbells. I’ve stayed committed to strength training through the CGX app and it’s fun to see I can handle heavier weights now.

promoting the GOHQ event with enthusiasm because I look forward to it ALL YEAR LONG! Get your free ticket!

The post life right now [august] appeared first on Miss Freddy.

Let’s walk through it.

don’t panic (seriously)

Acknowledge how overwhelming it can feel to suddenly become responsible for someone else’s lifetime of memories. And the emotions that come with it.

Give yourself permission to take your time. These photos have already waited decades to be dealt with. They can wait a little longer while you get emotionally ready to tackle the project.

step 1: get them somewhere safe

Before you do anything else, get the boxes out of danger. That means out of:

• attics (too hot)
• garages (too humid, too many bugs)
• basements (flood risk, mold risk)

Move them to an interior closet, a spare bedroom, or under a bed. Somewhere climate-controlled and boring. You’re not organizing yet. You’re just making sure nothing gets worse while you wait to start the project.

step 2: do a quick review (this part shrinks the project considerably)

This is my favorite step, because it’s where the project stops feeling impossible. You’re going to do a fast pass through the boxes and make quick decisions about whether to keep or toss. Separate documents or non-photo items into their own pile.

This is your time to toss the doubles (or triples!), blurry or terrible photos, photos without people where you don’t understand the context, etc. When I did my own family collection, over 50% of what was in the boxes wasn’t worth keeping or digitizing. Half. Gone. The project got SO much smaller, and the photos that remained actually felt meaningful because they weren’t buried under 20 blurry shots of somebody’s thumb (that someone paid to develop and therefore felt required to keep?).

Don’t overthink this pass. If you’re not sure, keep it. The point is to get the obvious trash out of the way.

step 3: sort into high-level categories

Here’s where people get stuck: they try to sort hyper-specifically by person, by year, and by event all at once, and their dining room table becomes a photo minefield they can’t clean up for weeks.

Don’t do that. At this stage, you only need high-level buckets. Something like:

• by decade (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s)
• by life stage (childhood, high school, early marriage, kids)
• by city if your family moved a lot
• by generation if you inherited multiple families’ worth (grandparents, parents, you)

These buckets exist to give some basic structure to the project and provide clear stop and start points on the next step. “I’m going to digitize the 1970s box today” is a real, concrete task. “I’m going to digitize all of grandma’s photos” is a task that feels too big to begin.

The finer sorting (by person, exact year, event, etc) is SO much easier after digitizing, because you can drag and drop and search instead of shuffling paper around.

step 4: digitize (DIY or hire it out)

Now you actually turn the piles into files. You have two real options:

DIY. You buy or borrow a scanner, set up a system, and work through the boxes at your own pace. This is the right choice if you have time and patience. It’s also cheaper up front, though it costs you hours.

Hire a professional. You ship the boxes (or hand them off), and someone else does the scanning. This is the right choice if you’re short on time or if you know yourself and know the boxes will sit in that closet for five years if you don’t hand them off.

There’s no wrong answer. This blog post walks through some considerations to help you make this decision.

step 5: organize and back up

Once your photos are digitized, they need a real home and two backup copies.

I recommend importing your digital photos into a photo service with smart search and facial recognition, like Apple Photos or Google Photos. These tools can automatically recognize things like dogs, soccer, birthdays, and other subjects, making it much easier to find specific photos later. You can also create more specific albums if you want to organize by person, event, year, or anything else.

For your two backup copies, keep it simple. External hard drives are a great option, or you can create a copy on a flash drive to give to another family member. The goal is to make sure your family’s memories don’t exist in just one place.

step 6: decide what to keep (physically)

Once your photos are safely digitized and backed up, you get to decide what happens to the original prints.

You have my permission to do whatever feels right for you. Keep the originals if they’re meaningful to you, if you love having something tangible, or if you simply don’t feel ready to let them go. Toss them if you’ve made peace with keeping the memories digitally and don’t want the physical clutter.

There’s no “right” answer here. Keep them. Toss them. Keep some and toss some. It’s your family, your memories, and your decision.

step 7: actually enjoy them

This is the whole point. Digitizing is the initial finish line… now comes the fun stuff.

Maybe that looks like:

• A photo book of the highlights from each side of the family
• A shared album with siblings and cousins
• A slideshow at the next family gathering
• A collection of favorites for the next generation

These photos have been sitting in boxes long enough. Now it’s time to actually use them, share them, and enjoy the memories they hold.

Ready to Get Those Photos Out of the Boxes?

You don’t have to tackle this project alone or figure it all out yourself.

My Scanning & Digitization Services can help you turn boxes of old photos, slides, and other family memories into organized digital files you can actually enjoy.

Prefer to DIY? My Organizing Old Photos Course walks you through the process step-by-step so you can digitize and organize your family photos yourself.

Now… go open one box!

The post what to do with boxes of family photos you inherited appeared first on Miss Freddy.

currently…

enjoying summer break. Recent highlights were a Rockies game and a Rapids game where this tiny purse fan came in really handy (it’s been SO hot here)!

playing with these skip balls at our neighborhood pool. I’ve never figured out how to skip rocks so these have been fun.

reading Sunrise on the Reaping. I re-read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire recently and it’s been fun to hear Haymitch’s story.

listening to The Shampoo Effect on audiobook.

watching the first season of The Americans. I was a big Felicity fan so it’s been fun to see Keri Russell in another role.

eating a few spoonfuls of Jeni’s ice cream after dinner every night. I received 9 pints as a birthday gift and they’ve all been seriously delicious.

taking Anti-Spike as my wellness habit for the month. I’ve had it for a long time but never used it consistently.

feeling proud of my commitment to strength training. In previous summers I’ve failed to carve out time for it while the kids are home for the summer. Still loving the CGX app.

shopping for school supplies. Both kids will be at the same (middle) school this year!

working on a new free training that’ll be available soon! The one I have right now is still solid but since it’s almost 3 years old I thought it was time for something fresh.

*This post contains affiliate links which means I will receive a small commission if you make a purchase based on my recommendation.

The post life right now [july] appeared first on Miss Freddy.

This is the moment most people decide they need to get serious about “getting organized.” If you want to actually feel like your camera roll is organized, the answer is albums.

Yes! Let’s organize your photos with albums!

Albums are the simplest, smartest way to organize your photo collection, and they’re so much better than the old folder system you grew up with. This post walks you through what an album actually is, why it beats folders every time, and a starter list of album ideas you can start building today.

what is an album, really?

An album is a grouping of photos. When photos are added to an album, the photos themselves don’t leave your library. They don’t get duplicated. They don’t get pulled out of your timeline. They just get tagged into a group you can open anytime.

Think of it like a playlist for your photos. The song still lives in your music library, but you can also drop it into your “road trip” playlist and your “workout” playlist at the same time. One photo, many homes.

Understanding what albums are meant to do changes everything about how you find and enjoy your photos.

Once you organize your photos with albums you’ll feel like you’re in control of your camera roll.

why albums are better than folders

Folders made sense in 2003. You had a desktop computer, a digital camera, and a USB cord. You’d dump the photos into a folder called “summer vacation” and call it a day.

But folders have a problem: a photo can only live in one of them. If you put your daughter’s birthday party in the “birthdays” folder, it’s not in the “2024” folder. If you put it in “2024,” it’s not in “kid photos.”

Albums fix this in a few important ways:

1. One photo can live in multiple albums at the same time.
2. The original photo stays in your main library, sorted by date automatically.
3. You can use smart search to quickly pull photos into albums based on what’s actually in them (people, places, things).
4. Albums sync across your devices, so the work you do on your laptop shows up on your phone.
5. You’re not transferring photos off your device, renaming or dragging things around in folders like it’s a part-time job.

Folders mean you have to manually handle and sort every single photo you take (no wonder you feel chronically behind on your photos!). Albums let your photo app do the heavy lifting, while you just pick the moments worth pulling together.

how to organize your photos with albums

Before you make albums, do yourself the biggest favor: gather all your photos in one place. This is the part people skip, and it’s the reason their photo library never feels organized.

If half your photos are still on an old laptop, a thumb drive, your husband’s phone, or a dusty external hard drive, no album system in the world will save you. Get everything into one cloud library first. Then start building albums there.

Once your library is gathered, make a short list of albums you’d like to create. Fix or six, not fifty.
Need some ideas? You’ll find a starter pack later in this post!

Think of how you can use the search features to build this album faster. Let’s say you’re going to start by making a Halloween album. You could search by words like “Halloween” or “October 31” or “costume” or “pumpkin” or “mask” or “candy.” Review the search results, select the great photos in that mix, choose Add to Album.

That’s right… you DO NOT have to review every single photo in your library to make an incredibly useful album! Let the Photos App do the heavy lifting!

1. Pick a small handful of albums to start. Five or six, not fifty.
2. Use the search and people features built into your photo app to pull photos in fast.
3. Add to your albums as you go, not in one giant weekend marathon.
4. Let go of the idea that every photo needs to be in an album. Most don’t.

Done is better than perfect here. A few albums you actually use beats a perfect, elaborate album system that exists only in your head. Unlike folders, albums are flexible and can change as your life changes (pick up a new hobby? add a new album for it!).

album ideas starter pack

Ready to organize your photos with albums? Yay! So… which albums are actually worth making? Albums will be highly personal to your life. Your kids, your hobbies, your interests, your projects. But here’s a starter list with albums I’ve found really useful in my own library. Hopefully it sparks some ideas to get you started.

• best of [kid name].
  Make one of these for each kid (don’t forget the pets!). Not every photo of them. The best ones. The ones you’d want in a yearbook, on a wall, or in a slideshow at their graduation.
  
• best of us / family favorites.
  A running album of the photos that capture your family at its happiest. Holidays, ordinary mornings, the goofy ones.
  
• home projects.
  The before-during-and after photos from projects, the kids smiling in front of open bathroom walls during a remodel.
  
• school memories.
  First-day-of-school photos, art projects, awards, field trips, school plays. One album per kid works great for me but some people divide into albums by school year).
  
• travel.
  One album per trip is the way I prefer to do it. These are the simplest ones to make- you just select the first date of the trip through the final day of the trip and ‘add to album.’ Then I recommend narrowing that album down to just the best/favorites. Makes creating photo books much easier when you’ve done this work!
  
• holidays.
  I shared the Halloween example above… that was the first album I personally made! But you can also make albums for traditions your family has like birthday morning pancakes, sitting on Santas lap over the years, christmas pajamas in front of the tree, the annual gingerbread house competition, etc.

common misconceptions about albums

Albums should be chronological (year, month, etc). Nope. Your photo app already does this automatically. Every photo is tagged with the exact date and time it was taken, and your library is already sorted that way. Building “All 2023” and “January 2024” albums is just recreating work your phone already did for you. That’s precious organizing time you’ll never get back.

Every photo needs to live in an album. This is the old folder mentality talking. With folders, a photo had to live somewhere or it felt lost. Albums don’t work that way. Your main library is the home for every photo. Albums are just the highlight reels you earmark on purpose.

Albums are just like folders. Folders move a file to one location. Albums are smart tags, so the same photo can live in your “Grandma” album, your “Christmas 2023” album, and your “For Printing” album all at once, without creating any duplicates. That’s the whole magic.

ready to organize your photos with albums and build a system that actually works?

Albums work best when your whole photo library is in one place. If your photos are still scattered across phones, laptops, and old hard drives, your album system will never feel complete (and you won’t really feel organized!).

That’s exactly what Backup Bootcamp is for. It’s my step-by-step course that walks you through gathering every digital photo you own and getting them safely into one cloud library, so you can finally build the album system you’ve been wanting. Get started here.

The post how to organize your photos with albums appeared first on Miss Freddy.