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4 ways Photos in MacOS Catalina helps you uncover your best images

The Photos app in Catalina can help you go back and find your best photos

Clifford Colby Managing Editor
Clifford is a managing editor at CNET, where he leads How-To coverage. He spent a handful of years at Peachpit Press, editing books on everything from the first iPhone to Python. He also worked at a handful of now-dead computer magazines, including MacWEEK and MacUser. Unrelated, he roots for the Oakland A's.
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Clifford Colby
2 min read
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Apple

If you live in Apple's world, the MacOS Photos app is a solid photographer's companion that includes a powerful collection of image-editing tools for improving the look of photos. 

It can also keep your photos organized by automatically sorting your photographs by date and location, and it uses facial and object recognition to tag images for faces, objects and scenes so you can search for photos by subject matter. You can also tag photos by adding keywords -- a handy feature lacking in Google Photos . And with Photos, you easily share images through Mail and Twitter, for example, by selecting a photo and then tapping the Share button.

The latest version of Photos that comes with MacOS Catalina adds a handful of new tools that can help you keep better track of your images and uncover your best shots. Here's how to start using Catalina's Photos app.

Watch this: MacOS Catalina: 5 best things

View your photos by day, month and year

In Catalina, Apple reorganized the Photos tab across the top of the app to help you more easily discover your photos. MacOS Mojave's version of Photos had a pop-up menu that gave you access to photos, moments, collections and years. Catalina swaps out that pop-up menu for four tabs that let you sort your photos by year, month and day or your entire catalog.

The photo previews in each tab are also larger than they were in Mojave, and the tool uses built-in intelligence, Apple said, to display the best part of a  photo in preview. Likewise, in your photo library, Photos highlights what it determines are the best images in your collection and removes duplicates.   

AppleCatalinaPhotosMonth

With Photos in MacOS Catalina, you can sort your images by year, month or day.

By year. The Years tab collects your photos with the oldest up top and the newest at the bottom. Double-tap a year to see photos broken out by month.

By month. Tapping the Months tab gives you a monthly view into your photos, with a bit of descriptive text up in the top left corner about where you took the photos.

By day. To drill down even more, tap the Days tap. Photos gathers photos together by day or blocks to let you see what you did in that time period. Apple said Photos picks what it determines are the best shots of the period to showcase the day. Tapping an image brings up editing and sharing tools.

For more, we have a look at Catalina's more important features and a guide on how to download and install the new MacOS.