
Have you updated your Mac laptop or desktop to 10.10.3 yet? If you have, you probably have noticed that iPhotos disappeared and Photos has taken its place in your dock.

If you don’t see the icon in your dock, just go to your applications folder (in Finder or hard drive icon). You will see Photos listed, and you can drag and drop it into your dock.
Folks who have iPhones and iPads will feel pretty comfortable using Photos because it is very similar to Photos on the Apple mobile devices. For those of you who are new to Photos, we will do a series of posts on how to use it, including:
- How it is organized
- Creating albums
- Sharing images and albums
- Editing
- Attaching an image to email or a text
Part 1: How are images organized in Photos?
Open Photos
Notice that at the top you have the choices of Photos, Shared, Albums, and Projects. Click on Photos–that’s the first part of the Photos app we will explore:
In the Photos section, images are organized and labeled as follows: Years/Collections/Moments/Individual images

Years
- Thumbnail images
- Chronologically by year

Collections
- Images are a bit bigger than thumbnails
- Chronologically by months and days

Moments
- Images are big enough to actually determine what they look like
- Arranged chronologically by day
- Images are full size
- In Moments, click on the individual image you want to see in full size.
To navigate among the different sections, use the arrows on the left-hand side of the top menu.

When you mouse over the arrows, the label will appear indicating which option you are choosing. In the image above, Years appears as I mouse over the left arrow indicating if I click there I will see my images displayed in the Years format (thumbnails).
Here are some useful websites about Photos for Mac. In the next post, we will explore Albums.
https://www.apple.com/osx/photos/
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how-to-use-new-photos-for-mac
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7982517/apple-photos-mac-iphoto-replacement-explainer-faq
Take some time to play with the different options. Soon you will feel as comfortable with Photos as you did with iPhotos!