Photos 5: Problems with the Smart Album Rule: Album is not Any

by: léonie

Last modified: Jan 26, 2021 4:20 AM

11 4357 Last modified Jan 26, 2021 4:20 AM

In the previous versions of Photos we could use a smart album to find all photos, that are currently not in any standard album. This has been useful to sort newly imported photos into albums.

We just had to create a new smart album with

File > New Smart album
Set the three parts of the smart rule to "Album > Is not > Any".
And optional add another rule "Date Added > is in the last > ... Days"
Combine the rules with "Match All".

This is currently problematic in Catalina. Photos 5.0 on Catalina can still find photos, that are not in any album. But if we delete an album, that is not empty, the photos in the deleted album will be treated as still being in an album. And there is no way to remove them from the deleted album, because this album can no longer be accessed.

We would have to duplicate all photos, that have been in the album, to get fresh copies not in an album, then delete the original copy.

Is is essential to remove all photos from an album, before we delete the album, if we want to use the rule "Not in any album":

The least trouble to fix the problem with the photos, that have been in a deleted albums, is to collect them again in an album and then to duplicate them with ⌘D and to delete the first version.

This is easy, if the photos are all new imports and you can select them all at once together in the Imports album and recreate the deleted album like this:

Select all new photos (that have been in the deleted album) in the Imports albumby selecting the range (select the first photo, then hold down the Shift key ⇧, then select the last photo of the range.
Create a new album from the selected photos with ⌘N. Open the new album from the sidebar.
Select all photos in the new album with ⌘A, if they should no longer be selected.
Duplicate the selected photos with ⌘D. The photos will stay selected. You will now be seeing the selected photos with the unselected copies side-by-side in the album.

Now delete the selected photos all at once with ⌘⌫ and keep only the copies.
Remove the remaining new versions with ⌫ from the new album. Delete the album.
The new versions should now appear again in the smart album "Album is not Any".

Empty the Recently Deleted album.

Trying to repair the Photos Library is a waste of time and an unnecessary risk in this case. A library repair will not fix it. At least in my Test Library the repair as been futile, as seen in this screenshot. There are no albums in the library at all any longer, but "Album is not Any" is empty, even after repairing the library.

Alternately, you could try to search for the photos not in any album with an Apple Script:

see: Script: Find Photos not in Any Album, for Photos 5 on Catalina

This bug seems to have been fixed in Photos 6 on macOS 11.1 Big Sur.