All Photos
All Photos is similar to the previous Years
view. Here, dragging the scale slider gives
you a good range of thumbnail sizes, all
showing photos in a grid. At smaller sizes,
photos are always cropped to squares,
shown without gaps.Days view
If you liked Moments, the Days view is
the most similar, grouping photos by
date. But there’s no way to reduce the
size of thumbnails to see more photos at
a glance; dragging the slider at the top
left just shrinks the whole timeline.Show file names
As you drag the slider to the right in All
Photos, the icon at the far left lets you
switch from squares to show photos
uncropped in full aspect ratio. You can
also show titles and other metadata (as
symbols) using View > Metadata.T
he Photos app has changed
quite a lot. With Photos selected
under Library at the top left,
you’ll see the tabs across the top have
changed from macOS Mojave’s Photos,
Moments, Collections and Years to
Years, Months, Days and All Photos.
The relationship between these is
clearest if, instead of clicking the tabs,
you zoom in and out using pinch zoom
on a Magic Trackpad.
There’s no equivalent for mouse
users, but you can double-click an item
to zoom in from Years to Months to
Days and finally to enlarge an individual
image. You can also flick between the
tabs using ç+ 1 , 2 , 3 and 4.
There’s no Moments view, even
though this still exists in iOS 13.
The alternative views on the left
include People and Places, organised by
facial recognition and location data asGet familiar with the new Photos
before, and now Memories, which uses
Siri’s AI to collect sets of photos based
on combinations of dates and places.Let it slide
Somewhat confusingly, there are now
three different types of slideshow in
Photos. Memories have Memory Movies,
synced via iCloud. Double-click a
Memory to see a page dedicated to it.
Double-clicking the image at the top
plays its Memory Movie. Scroll down
to see people identified in the photos,
a location map and related Memories.
To exit, click the chevron at the top left.
While a Memory Movie is playing,
move the cursor over it to show a control
bar. The left and right cursor keys can be
used to skip ahead or rewind, but not
precisely to the next or previous photo;
the Space bar pauses and restarts. Click
the gear icon at the right to change themood – affecting music and transitions- and duration (Short, Medium or Long,
if there are enough photos). This is all
the customisation currently available:
the Edit option in iOS 13, which lets you
change the title of a Memory and which
items it includes, doesn’t yet exist on the
Mac. But any edits you make to Memory
Movies on your iPhone or iPad will sync
to Photos in Catalina.
Back in the Memories tab, you can
≈-click a Memory and choose Play
Slideshow to make an instant slideshow.
This is different from Memory Movies.
Here, you can choose a Theme and
Music and click Play Slideshow (or press
Getting more
from Photos
Your snaps look more gorgeous than ever in macOS
Catalina’s new interface. Here’s how it all works
FEATURE Catalina tips & tricks
24 | MACFORMAT | APRIL 2020 macformat.com @macformat