Welcome to MOApp's myPhotos.

In this short manual you will find information how to setup and use myPhotos.
If you need more information and help about using my applications in general - please have a look here: MOApp Applications | General Help

With myPhotos you can do both - organize and mange your photos based on groups and directly access and skip thru your folders on your hard-drive. And due to the fact that a group in myPhotos is nothing else than a real folder on your hard-drive - you can even acces such a group directly from Finder…

The advantage of working with groups is to directly access all images in a folder on your hard-drive without using the Finder. When adding images to such a group they are automatically copied to the folder linked with that group. Added images can be auto-tagged based on the settings for the group.

More information regarding tags and keywords can be found in the chapter: Tags, Spotlight, OpenMeta and IPTC Keywords.

When in 'Finder Mode' can can directly access all your photos on your hard-drive. You are even free to directly edit them or apply tags and keywords.

More information regarding tags and keywords can be found in the chapter: Tags, Spotlight, OpenMeta and IPTC Keywords.

Hint

You are free to apply a default 'root' path in the Preferences.

myPhotos allows the direct import from a camera, any attached or mounted drive or a Scanner.
You are free to automatically rename and tag photos while importing them.

More information regarding tags and keywords can be found in the chapter: Tags, Spotlight, OpenMeta and IPTC Keywords.

Hint

Please remember to confirm every import by clicking the 'Done' button!

Of course an image is something visual - sometimes one need to know a little bit about the image - its Metadata. Thus myPhotos has a build-in info panel with every information you may ever need to know. This info-panel can also be used to apply a comment. Such comments can also be found by using Spotlight and are even available when you send a photo to another person (Mac).

More information regarding tags and keywords can be found in the chapter: Tags, Spotlight, OpenMeta and IPTC Keywords.

You are free to customize myPhotos to show the Finder information instead of the build-in.

Of course you organize your photos to later find them again with ease. Thus myPhotos supports Spotlight, OpenMeta tags and IPTC keywords. You can directly apply those tags and keywords from within myPhotos, search for them and even add comments. In 'Finder Mode' this even works directly for existing photos on your hard-drive. Please keep in mind - the use of those tags and keywords may slow down the app a little. You can customize the use and display of tags and keywords in the Preferences…


Spotlight | OpenMeta Tags

myPhotos makes use of tags (based on OpenMeta). These tags are written to your Spotlight's database - thus you can directly search for such a tagged file with Spotlight and already tagged images can be directly searched within myPhotos and other apps like myDocuments, mySnippets or Punakea and Yep etc. Using such tags in myPhotos will slow down the interface a little bit. For example a folder with 1.000 images (.jpeg | 4288 x 2848 pixel) needs up to two seconds in addition to load (incl. all previews | MacBook late 2009) when tags are enabled. The big advantage is - you can directly filter your images for those tags, you can directly tag your images when importing them from your camera…

IPTC Metadata

Metadata is 'data about data' - the IPTC Header contains information about an image. By enabling this feature in myPhotos your assigned tags will be also available for others, on different Macs, PCs and even in the internet - thus you can for example directly search with Spotlight or another copy of myPhotos on a different Mac. Of course this data need to be read for every single image and enabling this feature will slow the interface a little bit extra…

myPhotos is optimized for speed - but it will never be as fast as a database based application like Aperture!

Sorry, but that's life.
You can't have everything - a non databased application for your images and the same speed as Aperture.
But you can have the advantages of myPhotos with a really snappy interface :-)

But you can immediately improve the performance by:
· only using tags (keywords) when needed
· only using the info panel (EXIF data etc.) when needed
· only previewing with the main window (image browser)
· using a solid state drive (SSD) - you will love it!

If needed you can directly edit a photo from within myPhotos.
By default edited photos are saved as JPEG files - you are free to change this in the Preferences.

Please notice!

When editing a photo - you always have a loss in quality - always!

You are free to customize the behavior of myPhotos to fit your individual needs. A double-click can open the selected image in a new window, in its default application, in a build-in editor or in fullscreen view - if you like. myPhotos can be navigated with the keyboard and you can choose to rather see the Finder information of a photo instead of the build-in info-panel and you are free to individually in/exclude image formats…