Transcript

Before getting started, I wanted to take a minute to show you the organization of this course and how to use it.

Making a course on Photos pose several unique challenges, one of the biggest of which is that people use the Photos application on the Mac, the iPad, and the iPhone, but not necessarily all of them. There'll be some people that watch this course who only use an iPhone and some who primarily use a Mac. So I wanted to make sure everybody got what they needed to learn how to use Photos.

So, I had to come at this course really building two courses into one. There's a whole course in here about the iPhone and iPad. There's really another whole course in here about the Mac.

But I tried to also organize it in a way that makes it really easy for you to pick and choose as you go through. So let's just talk about the organization.

The first section is Overview and it talks about introductory matters and how to download videos and things like that. So, you can see that right here you can download. In fact, you're watching one of these right now.

After that, there's some real basic photo stuff like Library Management. This section is Mac heavy because a lot of the best library management tools are in the Mac, but there's also stuff in there for iPhone and iPad users.

And then there's a section on importing photos because that's so often the starting point. If you're new to Photos, you need to get that import done, and I cover that both for the Mac, the iPad, and the iPhone.

I also do an introductory section in there on photo formats

Next, we go into Taking Photos and, while this course is about the Photos application, taking pictures is also a huge part of that.

So I made a whole series of videos on how to take the best photos with your iPhone primarily. It starts with a photography basics course but then it goes through all the various camera features on the iPhone and iPad, it shows you how to use them, so you can make some really great pictures.

After that, we get into some photography accessories, and these are accessories for the iPhone, you know, additional lenses and tripod mounts and lighting. There's some great stuff out there that most of it will fit in your pocket and make your pictures better. And I’ll show you some of my favorites of those. 

And then we get into the “iPhone and iPad course,” and that's broken up into several sections.

The first is, how do you organize your photos and how do you organize them in Photos.

And there's a bunch of different ways you can do that and different ways you can index them using Favorites, People and Location, and there's individual videos on each one of those features.

After you organize your pictures, you're going to want to discover them and there's a separate section on that showing you how to discover your images using Search and Memories.

And then, you may want to improve your pictures, so there's a whole section on editing photos and there's are so many editing tools available to you on the iPhone and iPad. It's really quite amazing tools that used to cost hundreds of dollars and only be able to run on a very powerful computer now run on that little thing you keep in your pocket. And it's real fun going through all of the features that you can do to edit your photos on your iPhone and iPad.

And then once you get them all edited, you want to share them, and there's a section on sharing them.

I've also included a section on just dealing with video because the Photos application is also very powerful in dealing with video, particularly on the iPhone and iPad. So it's got its own series of videos there.

And then I've added in it another section with some additional applications, which are pretty cool, you know, might not look at some other apps that may be helpful on the iPhone and iPad.

Then we switch over to the Mac and I do, kind of, the same thing. 

There's a whole section on organizing photos on the Mac.

There's a section on discovering photos on the Mac, editing photos, and sharing them, all on the Mac.

I also cover managing video on the Mac and additional Mac apps. So you get another course, basically, on the Mac, just like we got the one on the iPhone and the iPad earlier.

There's some unique outliers after that.

Photos also has a version for the Apple Watch and the Apple TV, and I cover that in that section.

And backup is just so important. I use the term backup throughout this video course. If you want to have a drinking game, that's probably the best term to, you know, enjoy yourself while you watch the video. But I do have videos on backup as well towards the end.

And then we kind of get into the basics of application settings. And for application settings, I not only cover the Photos app on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but I also talk about the Camera app, which has some interesting application settings as well. So we cover that as well.

And then finally we get to the conclusion with additional resources. There's other people out there making great stuff on Photos. Some are Mac Sparky stuff. And my thanks.

And finally, I've made this section down here with these combined videos, and each one of these videos is individually downloadable. But you don't want to have to download a 130 videos. So for each section, I've combined them as much as I can so you can have a group of videos downloadable as one.

For instance, I'll just click right here on this Photos Library Management. There's, I think, four or five videos in here. It’s 16 minutes. If you just click that little Download button, you can download that whole section as one video. So you only end up downloading, you know, 10 or 15 videos instead of 130. I had to break them up, however, because there's limits on the download size but like I said, it's still a lot less than you would have otherwise.

So that's the general organization of the course. 

I think it’ll also be useful to take a look at an individual video as you're going through them. 

For each video, you can play it right here with the Play button. 

There's a scrub bar so you can scrub through the video to get to whatever section of it you want to see. Oops! I started the video.

And then there is a volume slider, so you can set the volume as high or low as you want.

With this little Gear icon, you can change the speed or the quality. Some people say I talk too slow. If you think I talk too slow, just click on that. Make it faster. You think I talk too fast, you can slow it down, too.

There's also a Sharing button here.

I've got a bunch of AirPlay devices in my house so I can share it straight to my Apple TV if I want.

And then there’s a Fullscreen button, if I click that, it makes it full screen.

And additionally, there's going to be a Closed Captioning button on these but as I record this video, the closed captioning files aren't done. I'll make a separate video on closed captioning. Just let you know that will be available about a week after this course releases. We're just trying to catch up with all these videos. 

This was a really big course. It's the longest video I've ever made, it's the most videos I've ever released as one course, but the Photos application just has so many pieces to it. And like I said, there's really multiple platforms. I really wanted to make sure no matter where you're coming from, when you get to the end of this course, you'll learn as much as you need about using Photos and taking better pictures.