What’s New in the Photos App

Now, let’s take a look at what’s new in the Photos app with macOS Catalina. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s go and open up my Photos app. Now the first thing that I want to talk about is moments collections in years. This is how Apple organized your photos in past versions of macOS. Your photos could be any moment, which is a small period of time, a collection, which is a collection of moments, and then you also have years. Well, that was always a bit confusing to explain as well as to understand. With macOS Catalina, you can see that they’re organized by years, months, and days.

Now, I want to look at all of my years. I go over two years here, and now I’m looking at them by year. Apple will highlight some of the best photos of that year for the title picture. I open up any one of these, and it’s going to open that year up. I can see all the photos or the highlights of that year. Let’s go ahead and click on 2018 here. I double click on it. Now what I’m doing is I’m looking at them by month. We can see a change to the month here. Right here, I’m looking at May of 2018. I scroll up, and we’re looking at June of 2018. Now it’s organizing them by month.

What do you think is going to happen if I double click on great smoky mountains here? It’s going to go into days. Let’s go ahead and double click on it. Now, I’m looking at them by day. Here we have June 21, 2018. These are my photos from June 22. Now, these are not all of the photos; these are highlights. What Apple is doing is new in macOS Catalina as well, it looks for the best photos, and it’ll place them in this category, the day category. If I want to look at all of my photos, then what I do is I go over to all photos, and now I can see all of my photos. There are still organized or sorted by day. I can see that these are from July 13 of 2015 to August 19 of 2019.

When I scroll up here, you’re going to see that those dates change. The first photo in this view here will be from August 16, 2015, and the last photo will be from 2019. We can also see any of our videos in here, and I double click on it, click on Play, and play the video. To go back, we click on the left arrow, and now I’m back. Let’s go back and take a look at months. I want to show you one more thing in these views here. I click on months, and you’re going to see I have this little more button here. If you’re familiar with iTunes or the new music app or podcasts app, you may be familiar with these three dots, the ellipsis. This means that there is more.

When I click on this, what I can do is I can show these photos on a map. Now, they’ve integrated that more button into the Photos app as well. What else is new? Well, let’s go back over to all photos. I’m looking at them by thumbnail. What I can do is I can zoom in and out when I’m looking at them as all photos. I want to see these thumbnails as a little bit larger. All I do is take two fingers on my trackpad and spread them apart. We can see we have larger thumbnails. If I want to make them small again, I pinch with two fingers, and now they’re small again.

Well, what else can you do with photos in macOS Catalina? Well, we can now edit our videos in our memories. If you’re not familiar with memories, if we go over to the left here, you’re going to see memories. What Apple will do, or what Photos will do, is to look at your photos and group them in memories based on date or location. Let’s go ahead and click on Memories to see some of my memories. I have this memory of Saugatuck dunes. We went on some dunes schooners. I took some photos, some videos. The Photos app created a memory on this. When I double click on this, what I’m able to do is play a video. You’re going to see we have a Play button here.

Also, I’m able to see all of the photos, and then I can see the groups and people in that memory, the places, and any related photos. This is nothing new with Photos and macOS, but what we do have with macOS Catalina or Photos in macOS Catalina is we can now edit our video. We can change the music and mood. Let’s go back up to the top. You’re going to see that this is a video. If we sit here for a minute, you’re going to see it’s playing a video. Well, that’s all we could do with Photos in past versions of macOS. Now with macOS Catalina, if I play this, let’s go ahead and play it, and it starts playing, but now what I’m able to do is I’m able to click on the gear here, and I can change the mood or music of my video. Then if I scroll up, I can also change the length of my video.

We couldn’t do this in previous versions of Photos with macOS. We could do it on our iPhone or iPad, but we couldn’t do it with a Mac. Well, now we can. You have to play the video and then click on the gear icon. That is what is new with the Photos app on macOS Catalina. We no longer have moments collections in years. They are grouped by year, month, and day. When we view them by month, day, or year, the Photos app we’ll pick the best photos and place them in that view. If you want to see all of the photos, then what you have to do is click on All Photos.

When you’re looking at all of your photos, you can pinch to zoom in and out. Then when you’re looking at your memories, you’re able to edit the video.

Those are some of the new items or new features that we have with Photos in macOS Catalina.