If you visit any large city and photograph tall buildings, you quickly understand the problem of perspective. Unless you are about half a mile away (just try that in New York) you have to shoot up and use a wide angle lens to fit it all in. The inevitable result is a building that looks like it's falling backwards. And if you're shooting 2 buildings side by side, it looks like they are going to hug.

When I was a young man, I remembered every movie I’d ever seen. Places I’d been. Restaurants enjoyed. People met. My photos were mostly a creative exercise, like a journal full of detail and consideration rather than documents of time and place. I lived in the fantasy that my photos were incidental to the journey.

What professional photographers don’t tell you is how bad they really are. Even the best of them fail most of the time. Which is to say that the images they show are only a fraction of the images they create. The rest? Just digital debris. So success, ironically, is largely a matter of hiding their mistakes.

It used to be, with film, that there were only two kinds of photos. The Keepers and the Discards. Either a picture was worthy of printing or it wasn’t. The iPhone changed all that. Here’s how to manage your Photos Library and keep it under control.

iCloud is just like that gas station along the highway where $2 gets me a quick, accurate tire service on a rainy night. I’m thrilled that it’s there. I’ll pay a little extra for the convenience. And I’ll probably pay more attention to my tire pressure just because I don’t have to crawl around and fuss with the tire gauge thingy to get the proper pressure.

By adding the Photos Widget to your Home Screen, your daily Favorites and Memories are front and center every time you open your iPhone.

These days, a professional photo session generally includes a flash drive or download of the image files from the shoot. That can be just a couple photos for a head shot to hundreds of photos for a big event like a wedding or reunion.

Sadly, too many of those precious photos end up languishing on a flash drive in a drawer or in an online gallery that doesn’t get a second or third look. And if they are downloaded, the images may be saved in some obscure folder on the hard drive that rarely sees the light of day. But what’s worse than not being enjoyed is the real risk of losing those special photos altogether.

When people reach out for help with their pictures, the conversation always starts with their number. The takeaway is that there is no right or wrong number for the images in your Photos LIbrary. If you are overwhelmed by the state of your collection, it’s not the overall number that’s causing the frustration but is more likely the result. Adjusting your point of view about photo management and understanding what all the numbers mean will deliver a happier outcome.

For me, summer is like a movie. Memorial Day hooks you with the promise of long, fun-filled days in the sun and reuniting with friends. Plots and subplots play out week by week with activities, travel, and reunions.

Want a sure-fire/first class/award-winning Mom experience for Mother’s Day? For you or for the Moms in your life?

Here’s what you do.

How do you keep your workplace/remodeling/physical therapy/window treatment/shopping reminder/dinged bumper pictures from cluttering up your Photos Library?

The whole idea of Apple Photos is to create a safe, secure library of pictures that can be called up and exported on demand, customized for their particular destination.

My first real gig as a freelance photographer was shooting sailboat races in the Pacific Northwest. I'd stand near the bow of a 16 foot long powerboat, taking pictures, as we sped alongside crazy fast racing dinghies plowing through turbulent seas.

Let's "face" it. Pictures of our friends, family, the people we miss, the people we met, and people we may never see again are the foundation of our Photos Libraries.

The thing about deleting pictures from your Photos Library is that they’re gone. I know. That seems stupidly obvious and not worthy of a 5 minute read.

Let Apple Photos do the de-cluttering for you. It turns out that if you hop over one tab from All Photos to Days, that clutter disappears! Same with Months and Years. Photos is smart enough to hide anything that doesn't seem "on brand" for your usual photo browsing.

As a lover of photos in general, and the caretaker of my own family picture library, it tears me apart whenever I hear someone caught in that terrible place. That one where their iPhone is crushedsoakedloststolendeadgone and it's the only place their honeymoonnewbornlatefatheroldfriend's photos exist.

In 2002 amateur photographers were thrilled by how they could make photo books and order prints without ever leaving iPhoto. True to the Apple brand, the books were easy to create and the quality was as good or better than comparable books from other printers. You didn’t have to export pictures to another bookmaking app or create an account with another company. People made Apple photo books for all kinds of events and occasions.

One of the great things about Apple products is that Key Commands are consistent across the macOS and apps. With practice, key commands are much faster than using a mouse and have been a professional trick for decades.

Photos are, at their best, an expression of how we see things. What we choose to show and what we don't. Like a picture frame, the cropping of a photo can make all the difference in what draws attention and how an image peaks our interest.