I woke up this morning really wanting to say hi to you. It’s a really different Memorial Day this year, so it’s also a great time for some R&R along with remembrance. If you aren’t doing a traditional memorial parade, picnic, or potluck with the people you like to hang out with, here’s the next best thing: an easy way to find and enjoy past Memorial Day celebrations and honor your veterans.

If you have an iPhone, you are probably already connected to the iCloud, and your newer photos are partially organized already, even if you don’t feel like they are. The Apple iCloud Photos combination is smart, so it will do some of the photo organizing work for you.

Just type Memorial Day into your iPhone or Mac Photos app search bar, and you’ll see photos from previous Memorial Days. You don’t have to tag them or file them or anything! The program can find that day, even though it occurs on a different date each year. You can try this on holidays like Easter or Thanksgiving, too. And of course, you can search for your special someone’s birthday date–without the year–to get a selection of birthday pictures.

Once you find those fun pictures, especially if you aren’t hanging with the usual suspects this year, you can email, text, or post those pictures right from the Apple Photos app. Just click on the photo or multiple photos, then click on the icon that looks like a rectangle with an arrow pointing up. What a sweet way to stay close to your friends.

That search bar is pretty powerful. You can search for all kinds of things that will help you find just the right photo. For instance, you can search for uniform or hat to pull up pictures of your veterans. You can search for the word pie or flag. It isn’t always perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than scrolling through tens of thousands of photos. You can see here that it thought a picture of my skirt was a flag, which is understandable. But it also correctly identified pictures where there was just a small portion of a flag in the corner of the picture. That’s pretty clever.

If you have face tagging turned on, you can also search for your favorite veteran by name.

Here’s something you might not know…once your older print photos are scanned and loaded into your Apple iCloud Photos app, those vintage photos are also searchable, by word or faces. (We LOVE scanning client photos and adding them onto your digital collection to make them easy for you to search!) Photos with friends are going to look different this year, like this selfie with my friend Kara.

Apple Photos isn’t the only program that is able to allow you to search. Google Photos is the best at this, to the point that it’s scary (one of the reasons I don’t use it when privacy is a concern). Setting up your Android phone photos is similar to what’s I’ve described here. Even desktop programs like Mylio can help out. The more you add keywords to your photos, the better chance you have of finding photos later by using more personalized search words.

We know from experience with our many, many clients that organizing photos seems overwhelming. For today, just enjoy your holiday R&R, and search for some great photo memories the easy way. If you’d like to create a photo project to honor your veteran or fallen hero, please get in touch. We can have you sorted by Veteran’s Day. The holiday may look different this year, but I still hope you manage to have some pie.

Stay safe.