Without a doubt, the most productive feature in the latest version of Apple Photos is the addition of Collections. It unites the photo organizing in a more efficient way, makes it possible to customize your experience, and it turns your iPhone into a nifty presentation platform.

Gotta love it.

Apple Photos has always been envied for the auto organizing it does, but the structure of it had become an evolutionary hodgepodge. Albums and Folders were sensible enough, and media types made sense if you knew where to look.

Favorites.

Memories.

People.

Okay. Those are sidebar links on the Mac, but on mobile? Was it in For You or Albums? Not to mention Shared With You/Shared by You/iCloud Links/Recents and so on.

Apple Photos really packs in a LOT of tools to find the photos you’re seeking, but sometimes you needed to dig deep to find the right one. More often than not, scrolling seemed easier.

Collections seeks to simplify all that by minimizing - at least on iOS and iPadOS - the use of tabs/lists/links and by presenting Collections as a customizable palette of Widgets. Basically, everything has become a Collection, with a unified look and feel. So even though you’ll see familiar names like People & Pets, Memories, and Albums, they all fall under the Apple concept of Collections.

Apple Photos now sees every group of photos as a Collection. Whether it’s an Album, People tag, Video group, Search return, Featured Photos group, or the new Recent Days, your result is presented in the same viewing format. And that format is set up as a ready-to-share slide show for your meetup with friends.

When you open any Collection, the display defaults to an animated slideshow with a grid of photos underneath. Perfect for handing to a table mate for show-and-tell. Coupled with a pre-flight you’ve got a chat-worthy presentation right at your fingertips.

What you see when you first open a collection is the slideshow and photo grid as you would expect. But with a tap, you can switch to a Summary View of the Collection that distills it down to what Photos considers the most important images and presents them in a layout with some photos featured at a larger size. What I call, “Just The Facts.”

This is like the old Days View that created a curated sample of each day’s pictures without signs, similar photos, and other visual clutter. And as it happens, the new Recent Days Collections still do that and default to Summary View on launch.

So, in any Collection you have the choice of a curated Just The Facts Summary View or a Deep Dive into all the photos assigned to that collection, either by you or by Apple Photos.

But that’s not all.

Even though you don’t have any control over the selection of images in Summary View, you can change some settings for the whole Collection that guide it.

For starters, the Sort button - double arrows - opposite the Summary/All button, lets you choose what kind of content you want in the Collection. Tap Filter and you can choose what kind of media - photos, videos - the Collection should include.

View Options lets you configure the overall Collection view by choosing the style and size of the image grid as well as the presence of the slideshow. These settings apply to all Collections, not just the one you’re viewing.

Finally, for the ultimate presentation, there’s the option to turn any collection into an editable, shareable Memory Movie.

Collections views offer a user friendly, professional way to showcase your photos and share them with friends. Before your next meetup, spend just a few minutes reviewing your pictures and make a couple Collections you can share.