Photography with Apple

This Shortcut Catalogs and Evaluates Your Images on Disk or in Photos

A six action Shortcut deconstructs photos on disk or in Photos and suggests improvements using AI

LLMs and Photo Analysis (image by author)

I have many photos (over 100,000) and on an average trip, I take two or three thousand more. Guess what. I’ve nearly used up my 2 TB of iCloud storage (£8.99 per month) and the next tier up is 6 TB (£26.99 per month). I don’t need 6 TB, three would do, and I would rather not pay £26.99 per month for space I don’t need.

That was the issue that set me searching for an alternative to Apple Photos. As you’ll see, in pursuing this, I stumbled upon a remarkable feature hidden away in Apple Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 that far surpassed what Photos can do.

Ten years ago, this wasn’t a problem because I stored all my photos, taken with a DSLR, on disk and used Adobe Lightroom to manage them. What changed was that iPhone cameras vastly improved, and Apple made it easy to store photos in iCloud. They added AI search and made it all too easy to just dump photos in iCloud.

So I pondered returning to disk storage, but I don’t want to lose all those AI-powered featured provided by Apple Photos.