Transcript

When you first start it with Apple Photos, it gives you the screen that explains how to import photos. You'll know there's nothing here about iPhoto or Aperture, but if you have an iPhoto library and Aperture library, it's going to try and import that automatically for you. The good news on that is it uses a particular file format that allows Photos and iPhoto to both see your photo library images, and it's a safe way to get upgraded. Apple has not actively developed iPhoto for many years now, and I strongly urge you to switch over to Photos at this point.

In addition to importing your iPhoto library however, as you can see, there's a lot of additional ways to import photos into your library. You can connect a camera or memory card, you can drag pictures from your Desktop or folder into your library. You can also import with the Import menu, and there's iCloud Photo Sharing, which I have a separate video on in the prior section. So let's see a few of these in action.

I just pulled the memory card out of my camera and now inserted into my Mac. And when I did that, the device A732, which is the name of this memory stick appears in the sidebar of photos, and all the images I just took on that memory stick show up. I’ve got the ability now to import those if I want, and I can also delete them off the card as I import them.

At the top of the screen, I've got the ability to say open photos for this device in the future whenever I plug this memory stick in, and I can also tell it specifically where to import them. I'm going to tell it to put it into a new album called Yoda. And I'm gonna go ahead and mark delete.

Another option I have is I could select just various ones of these and then import only those selected, but I want to import them all. So I'm gonna go ahead and import them all and delete the originals off the stick.

And now that I've done that, I've created an album called Yoda that has these images in it. There they are, imported in. This is my Yoda on my desk. It keeps me company all the time. You Import Video the exact same way. Because I did this on my iMac, there's an SD card slot in the back of the machine, I can just plug into it, and I'm good to go.

With the current Apple laptops however, that's not a possibility. Some of the older laptops have SD cards built into them. But these days Apple doesn't put those into laptops. 

So you're going to need a dongle. This is the one apple sells. It's the USBC two SD card dongle. You can plug this into your laptop and import your photos no problem. There are others on the market. But when it comes to these dongles, I usually just buy the Apple one because I know it's always going to work.

You can also add pictures just by dragging and dropping them into the application. I've got a couple here of the dog, I'm gonna drag them in, and you can see the little plus symbol shows up when I drag it over. If I let go then it gets added to the library.

I've got another one here. And another trick you can do is you can just pull it down to the Photos icon and do the same thing. If you let go of it, it adds the photo at that time.

Another way you can import images is go up to the Files menu. Click Import. Let me go to my downloads.I've got three pictures there, I'm gonna select all three of them. Click review for import. And there they are.

I'm going to put these into the library instead of the Yoda album. And I've got the same options here. I can select limited ones if I want or I can select them all. And I can click import all new photos, and now I've imported those as well. If you've got a big pile of photos, you're importing those files. Don't forget that Command+A will select all the files in a given directory. So maybe you've got thousands of pictures in a folder. Just go into the folder, select one, tap Command+A on your keyboard, and then you'll get them all in your library. 

And you'll know I'm on the imports window here. It shows me each separate imports so I can see them over time. These are separated because I did them separately. I dragged one into the app and then drag another one onto the icon. These three I imported all at once, so they're grouped together. From that section that you can work on those photos. I'm gonna take all five of those, I'm gonna right click on it, and then say add to new album. And I'll give that one a name for the dog. And now I've got two albums I’ve created based on these imported images, one for a Ashoka, and one for Yoda.

And I've used all those methods to import images. If you ever lose track of images, just go back to that Import tab. And that's a good way to see what you've added to your library recently.

Then, of course, you get many pictures added to your library through your iCloud Photo Sharing. Once you turn that on, everything you take with your iPhone and your iPad just automatically shows up in your library.

And that's all there is to it, to adding pictures and videos to your Photos Library.