Software is not that different than dinosaur evolution theory except that the whole Mesozoic Era is about 20 years in digital time and we play the creators.

If you’re an Apple user, chances are that you got an alert recently about My Photo Stream being discontinued on Wednesday, July 26th.

Somehow the announcement recalled my childhood obsession with dinosaurs and their evolutionary trees that played out over eons, dooming some creatures to branch off into obscurity while others kept evolving and adapted into birds.

I got the news recently, in an email, that they don’t want me anymore.

That hurts. Sort of.

But, I get it. Relationships are a two way street and I guess I dropped out. Didn’t pay at-tention. Things got in the way.

So there it was.

“It’s been awhile since you logged in . . . Due to inactivity, your account is scheduled for deletion on March 1, 2023”

If you visit any large city and photograph tall buildings, you quickly understand the problem of perspective. Unless you are about half a mile away (just try that in New York) you have to shoot up and use a wide angle lens to fit it all in. The inevitable result is a building that looks like it's falling backwards. And if you're shooting 2 buildings side by side, it looks like they are going to hug.

When I was a young man, I remembered every movie I’d ever seen. Places I’d been. Restaurants enjoyed. People met. My photos were mostly a creative exercise, like a journal full of detail and consideration rather than documents of time and place. I lived in the fantasy that my photos were incidental to the journey.

What professional photographers don’t tell you is how bad they really are. Even the best of them fail most of the time. Which is to say that the images they show are only a fraction of the images they create. The rest? Just digital debris. So success, ironically, is largely a matter of hiding their mistakes.

It used to be, with film, that there were only two kinds of photos. The Keepers and the Discards. Either a picture was worthy of printing or it wasn’t. The iPhone changed all that. Here’s how to manage your Photos Library and keep it under control.

The search feature in Photos has gotten better every year so it seemed like a decent test to use it for an Easter retrospective. Sure enough, when I searched on "Easter," Photos was able to find over 4 dozen pictures from years past, going back to 2001 and our first Easter trip to visit family in Jacksonville.