How do you organize your photos?

I store and organize my photos in Apple’s Photos app on my Mac + iPhone + iPad. I use the iCloud Photos feature so that all of my photos are also uploaded into iCloud storage as a backup, and are also available on all three devices for convenience.

When I’m traveling internationally, I often bring my iPad but not my Mac. I use a camera adapter doohickey to import from my SD card to the Photos app on the iPad. When I have down time I’ll cull the photos and do some minor editing on the iPad. Later when I’m connected to WiFi (typically not until I’m back home) the photos will automatically upload to iCloud and thus appear on my Mac and iPhone. If I’m not traveling internationally I usually go straight from the SD cards to the Mac.

On the Mac version of Photos I first do a pass at culling, and then run a script to set the title of each photo uniquely (based on a date + counter). Photos does a good job at grouping by date/time intervals, so I don’t worry about that aspect. I initially mark all of the animals & plants with a “needs ID” keyword. I then work out IDs as best I can and apply keywords for taxon levels (unfortunately Photos does not support hierarchical keywords the way Lightroom does, so I have to add separate keywords for “animal”, “reptile”, “lizard”, “skink”, etc.). Photos supports a “description” that’s distinct from the title; for the description I use the format “Common Name (Scientific name)” for taxa with a known common name, or “Scientific name” otherwise.

Once I’ve done a (reasonably) complete job of ID’ing all my latest batch of photos in this way, I then import them into iNaturalist. When corrections and more-specific IDs are made on iNaturalist, I go back and change the descriptions (and keywords if appropriate) in Photos to match. Often I remind myself to do this by emailing myself the URL of the iNaturalist observation page that has modified by original ID.

Photos on iOS doesn’t show the titles, descriptions, or keywords, but it does let you search for titles, descriptions, and keywords that were set on the Mac. I use this often when trying to find a particular photo to show someone when I’ve got my iPhone or iPad with me.

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