How to quickly take charge of your photos with 3D Touch

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3d touch photos
Depending on where you are, 3D touching a photo offers different options.
Photo: Cult of Mac

3D touch is the feature that keeps on surprising you. Just when you thought you’d discovered all its tricks, up pops another one. Today we’re going to see how pressing on pictures in the Photos app offers all kinds of handy shortcuts for wrangling Faces, Albums, and Moments.

Fast photo management with 3D Touch

This is a real bread-and-butter time saver. Anywhere in your Collections view, you just Force-touch on a photo, and then swipe up. Don’t press too hard, or the photo will open and you’ll have to go back and start over. When you succeed, though, you’ll be rewarded with options to Copy, Share, Favorite, or Delete the photo, all without accessing any popovers or menus. It’s a real timesaver once you get into the habit.

3D Touch in Albums

Press harder on your photos to get all kinds of handy shortcuts
Press harder on your photos to get all kinds of handy shortcuts

Any time you’re in an Album view, either one you created yourself, or one of the built-in ones like Selfies, or Slo-Mo, you can force-touch and swipe up on image to bring up a slightly different set of options: Share, Favorite, Show Photos from this Day, and Delete. It’s a little confusing which options you get in which view, but usually the one you want is somewhere on the list.

3D Faces

This one may be a real surprise to you. When you’re in the Faces section of the Photos app (Get there by tapping Albums, and then People), you can 3D touch a photo for some handy face-recognition-related options. You need to be in a person’s own “album” view, which you get to by tapping on their face in the People screen, and then you go ahead and force touch and swipe up, like before.

This time you get options to Copy, Share, Favorite, Show Photos from this Day, and Delete, but you also see a Not This Person option. This a fantastic way to weed out the pictures that have accidentally been recognized as the wrong person. In fact, I can’t even find a way to do this without 3D Touch.

It pays to experiment in the Photos app, because there really are a lot of hidden tricks under those 3D touch presses. It’s a shame some of them are so well hidden, but once you’ve finally discovered them, they’ll be essential.

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