How to view Moments in Photos 5.1

by: léonie

Last modified: Jul 2, 2020 2:10 AM

2 1020 Last modified Jul 2, 2020 2:10 AM

The moments are one of the best features in Photos. They are grouping the photos into subsets of photos taken at the same place at the same time, perfect to focus on the photos from a particular shooting session and to weed out the bad or boring shots and picking the photos to keep. Photos 1 to Photos 4 have been showing the moments in the Moments tab or we could use the contextual menu item "Show in Moments".

Since Photos 5.0 in Catalina the "Moments" tab and "Show in Moments" are missing from the user interface. We have the "Days" tab with a pretty tiled view of selected, cropped photo or video snippets, without titles or badge overlays. This view is nice for a quick slideshow of the best photos, but useless for managing the photo library and weeding out the bad shots. Clicking "Show All" will take us to "All Photos" instead of the moment, where the boundaries between the days are missing and it is hard to work in this view in a large library.

There are three easy methods to see all photos of a day:

A. Use the Search Field:

The moments are still there, as search results. We can access them by typing the date into the search field. The search results will usually include the "Moments" for the date. Clicking the selected moment will take us to a view like a memory. Click "Show more" will change this to a view, where the thumbnails are not tiled, but in the correct aspect ratio, where the titles and badges are shown. Only, the there will be no slider to enlarge the thumbnails.

For example: The search result with the "Moments" at the bottom: (my Mac is set to use the date format day-month-year, enter the date according to the format you specified in the system preferences).

The moment as a memory:

Finally - a useful view of all photos of the Moment, perfect for picking the favorites and keepers and for getting the titles consistent:

To be able to see the titles below the thumbnails and the photos in the correct aspect ratio, enable the titles in the View > Metadata and click the Aspect button to the right of the traffic light: How to view the titles or filenames below the thumbnails in Photos 5.0 - Apple Community

B. Filter "All Photos"

When I return from a vacation, where I took plenty of photos, I tag them with keywords for the shooting session. All my recent photos from the Okavango Delta have the keyword "2019_Okavango" and a keyword "Day_01", "Day_02", etc. for the day of the trip. I add these keywords to the quick group of the Keyword Manager, so they will show in the filter.

Now I can filter the "All Photos" View by checking the keywords for the shooting session and only this day will be shown in All Photos.

For example, with the keywords "2019_Okavango" and "Tag_10" checked:

The advantage of the filters is, that we can filter by additional criteria, and that the size slider is available in the toolbar. We can enlarge the thumbnails to see more details.

C. Use a smart album

For a quick selection of the photos from a particular day, we could create a smart album "Moments". A smart album has many advantages. We can sort the photos and we can use the size slider to enlarge the thumbnails. We can use the Filter in addition to the smart rules.

File > New Smart album
Name the new album "Moments"
Set the rule to "Date Captured is ...." and pick the correct day you want.

I am keeping a predefined Smart album ready and just modify the date to the moment I want to be working on.