My dad passed away in that time before audio and video tape made home re-cordings a commonplace family heirloom. As far as I know there’s nothing of him in motion, even in silent 8mm home movie footage. And as much as I treasure the photos I have to remember him by, I’ve come to appreciate the power of motion and sound to spark special memories. I see it with my clients all the time.

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.

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.

One of the coolest features of Apple Photos is the People tab that uses face recognition to create personalized collections of our lives and the people we know. Family, friends, colleagues, that old boyfriend, a favorite teacher. Now, more than ever, we want to celebrate our community and remember those who have shared our journey for an hour or for decades.

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.

If you use the Apple ecosystem as it’s designed, deleting a picture from Photos on your iPhone will delete that photo everywhere. From your Mac, iPad, anything that’s synced to the iCloud Photo Library. The whole idea that Apple developed is to make it really easy to get at your photos wherever you are.

iCloud was the first and arguably the best known of all the popular cloud computer services, but it's also the least understood. Features rival the offerings of Dropbox, Amazon, and Google, but what sets iCloud apart is how it enables and supports the whole Apple ecosystem.

Sharing your photos is one of the best paybacks of photography. Publishing your view of the world to family and friends. Social media and the internet has made it so easy to get your work out in front of other people and show off your creative side.

If you ask people what they use to manage pictures on their iPhone, they probably won't say “Apple Photos.” Same for their Mac. Or iCloud for that matter. And it doesn’t help that the name of what it is is the same as what it does.