Last year I started a new collection of images. I began adding postcard views and photos of my beloved city of Providence to my photo archive. There are a few hundred pictures in the cache. This weekend there is a big ephemera show and I wanted to be prepared. As an end of the year resolution I scanned them all. Added them to Apple photos on my computer and even added keywords to the images. This took some time. The goal was to have a portable library of these images to take with me to the show so that I didn’t buy duplicates.
It seemed like a good idea. After trying for an hour to transfer these scans to my iPad I called Apple Support. They are always helpful. Within an hour everything was set up and the images were now in Photos on my iPad. Great! Not so fast….
I opened the app and tried to search by keyword. Nope. Not an option. Searched the web and discovered that there were no solutions. Ridiculous, I thought. That can’t be the case, could it? Indeed the reality is that you can’t search photos by keyword in Apple Photos on mobile apps. You can search by year or by words in the title of the images.
Surely someone had created an app to fill this gap. Searching for photo organizers for the iPad I found two that seemed a likely fit.
Slidebox
This free app had great reviews. There are versions for IOS and Android.
It’s easy to use. Swipe to delete from your feed in the app or to move forward through images. Create albums and you can quickly add images by clicking the album below the picture. Simple right. Nope. What I wanted an app to do was look at all my pictures including the ones I’d added through iCloud. Sure Slidebox showed me all the pictures I’d taken with my iPad, but none of the images from my postcard album appeared.
Back to square one.
Pixsort
This one had real possibilities. According to the reviews the app lets you manage your images by date, location, people and keywords. Bingo! You guessed it. There was a problem. I saw a lot of the images on my iPad but not all of them. Instead of showing me the two hundred scans, I could see 23. That’s all. I’d say that this is a big bug in the app.
On the plus side, the app did allow me to set up keywords for those images and made it easy to sort and see them. Too bad I couldn’t view all of my pictures.
I’m hoping that the developers fix this wee issue.
Adobe Lightroom
Colleagues suggested I use Lightroom. It’s a great tool but a bit expensive. At close to ten dollars a month that’s more than a hundred dollars a year. Yikes! At some point soon I’ll probably have to go with this option. The steep learning curve is what keeps me from making that investment. It’s all about time and money.
A Simple Workaround
If all Photos on the iPad would let you sort by was date, place you took the image and a keyword in a title, I had a few options. I could go through every image and rename them. Too time consuming for right now. Then it hit me. I could put the images into albums. The titles would correspond with general category type keywords for instance “Schools.” It worked! I could see all the images in organized digital piles.
You can do the same thing for all your family photos.
- Scan them and put a name in the file name to make it easy to find them on your mobile device.
- Create an album for each person. Once you’ve created the album you can quickly add images to the album by selecting them. I used the keywords on my desktop to make sure I found all the images for the specific albums.
This workaround fit my criteria. I’ll be able to go to the show and see my images. It was an easy solution that didn’t take a lot of time to implement. It’s not perfect, but it will help me avoid duplicate purchases. I still wish that I could search using all the keywords I set up for streets and buildings. It’s going to be clunky to browse all those pictures by album.
In the meantime, if you have a lot of pictures on your phone or tablet that you’ve taken with your devices experiment organizing them using the two apps mentioned above. It won’t cost you anything to give them a try.