My free six month trial of Apple Music is coming to an end soon, so I’ve been thinking about what to do next. I like Apple Music enough that I’d already decided to keep going with it after the trial was done. And since that means I’ll be giving Apple $10/month, that got me thinking about signing up for Apple One for $15/month, and getting Arcade, TV+, and 50 GB of iCloud too.
I’m still not happy about the number of subscriptions I’m paying for right now, but I guess I’m resigned to it. I could go down the hole of listing them all out again and thinking about whether I need them or not, and whether I’m getting enough use out of this one or that one, and what the alternatives are, but life’s too short and we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. Eventually, I’ll have to cull some of them, but for now, eh, I might as well give Apple $15/month so I can listen to music and watch Ted Lasso and play some games. So I signed up for Apple One today.
The first thing I’m doing with it is turning on iCloud Photos. Up until now, I’ve been syncing photos from my iPhone and iPad to my Mac the old-fashioned way, and using the photo library on my Mac as my master library. It’ll be nice to have that all happen automatically now, and have access to all my photos on all of my devices. Prior to turning on iCloud Photos, I had about 4500 photos, taking up about 12 GB, on my Mac. The library seems to be getting a bit bigger since I turned on syncing this morning. I guess that’s due to duplicates, which seem to be showing up on the Mac as the iPhone sync progresses. I turned on the “optimize Mac storage” setting in Photos when I turned on iCloud, so I might wind up with a smaller local library, eventually. I’m not sure how much total cloud space it’ll use up, but I’m sure it’ll be well within my 50 GB limit.
It looks like I’m going to need to run a cleanup to get rid of the duplicates. I have an old program that I used once to clean up dupes in my old iPhoto library, a long time ago (2014, I think), and it appears to still work. When I launch it, it “recommends” that I upgrade to a new program that costs $20, but the old version still seems to work fine. It found 168 dupes and put them in an album. From there, I could delete them via the Photos app. If I didn’t already own that program, I’d consider PhotoSweeper ($20) or PowerPhotos ($30), both of which I found via recommendations from the MPU forums.
Speaking of MPU, I’ve been thinking that I should take a look at David Sparks’ Photos Field Guide. I should learn more about taking, editing, and managing digital photos. Of course, I’ve been home alone for the past year, so all of my recent photos were taken within a one-mile radius of my apartment. I have so many photos of Van Fleet Gardens at this point that I could probably stitch them all together into a 3D model. But hey, someday we’ll be able to travel again, and I’ll go someplace interesting and take some cool photos.