The Photos item in the sidebar displays your image library content by days, months, or years. The macOS Catalina version of Photos has updated the Photos tab to provide viewing options by Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. The Photos category also provides access to a tab that allows you to further refine the view by Years, Collections, Moments, and Photos.

This allowed Photos to keep together images that were taken at one location during a single day. In previous versions of Photos the Photo category displayed images by the time they were taken, and further sorted them by location. The intelligence system Photos uses when making the choices for the cover photo images as well as photo previews (see below) appears to be spot on, at least in testing on my relatively small image library. Cover photos can also use video or Live Photos. These cover photos seem to feature people, faces, or pets, depending on the event.

Once sorted, Photos creates a cover photo by picking an image, which it then crops, and sets magnification. Events are sorted both chronologically and geographically. Photos you take that correspond to an event, such as a birthday party, a vacation, a garden harvest, or a first trip to the beach, are automatically highlighted by the new machine learning system built into the Photos app. Apple is using machine learning in some interesting ways to bring new capabilities to the Photos app. The models allow the Photos app to identify patterns and make basic decisions.

The new features in Photos run the gamut from minor tweaks to the user interface to the use of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that concentrates on data analysis to build analytical models. In this Rocket Yard guide, we’re going to take a look at the Photos app included with macOS Catalina.

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