Photos not showing up anymore in a specific smart album that should show all photos that are not in any album

Sorry, I missed that bit! Thanks for all the work.

Stephen

Hi Dave, see my reply above. It ran on my Library in less than five minutes for c. 13,000 photos, 85 Albums and 20-odd folders. I'm running Catalina 10.15.5 on a 1 TB SSD. Also, the other script to produce a list of Albums and Folders ran even quicker.

Is there something else going on?

Stephen

That is good to know, Stephen.

My library is an iCloud Library. Perhaps that is making a difference.

And the folders are nested deeply.

Great 😊 You're welcome.

There is a big difference here: I was searching for only one photo, not the whole Library, which could easily account for lengthy searches.

My search was needed because one of my Smart Albums was not showing the expected results of photos not being in an Album. I couldn't find which Albums they were in. However, since playing around with Léonie's script, the problem seems to have gone away. Could the search have reset a flag somewhere? I don't know.

Hope this helps.

Stephen

This user tip might shed some additional light on the bug: Problems with the Smart Album "Album is not Any" in Photos 5.0 - Apple Community.

I was wrong - the problem has not gone away. So I have resorted to following the user tip mentioned by Old Toad and prepared by Léonie. I applied the process by year and I've successfully completed 2000 to 2014, but something odd is now happening.

Having gathered the 2015 photos in the '__NotInAnyAlbum' album, duplicating them has stopped working properly. Initially, I tried selecting all the pictures, which has worked for previous years but they failed to duplicate. Testing various approaches, I found that selecting a reduced number worked for a while and I have been duplicating, deleting and removing 15 at a time. But the number I can do this with gradually reduces, until only one at a time is possible.

The error sometimes results in the app not doing anything, sometimes the 'Duplicating' progress bar shows but then disappears at the end without duplicating photos, and sometimes the progress bar appears fleetingly after which nothing happens. In testing, I have restarted the app and the machine, I have left it alone for a significant time to see whether I'm just impatient, and I have rerun the searching script. The latter seems to help a little, but the problem soon recurs. I've even upgraded my iCloud storage, although it had 7GB free space, in case the synchronisation was struggling. The problem is not confined to one Mac, either.

Has anyone any idea what's happening, please?

TIA

Stephen

I have found what was causing the duplication process to fail. I'll explain it here in case it helps with anyone esle's problems

When selecting a collection of photos and trying to duplicate them, if the collection contains one photo that won't duplicate then none of them will. So selecting the whole album failed, but repeatedly selecting, say, the first 20 would work until a photo that won't duplicate gets into that group, in which case the first 20 won't duplicate. Reducing the size of the group gradually to one then identifies an individual photo that won't duplicate. Remove that photo and repeat.

Doing this for about 2,000 photos revealed about 14 that will not duplicate whatever I try. I kept 11 of these to review and I can't see much commonailty between them.

• They're all in 2015, but that's the album I was working with. I haven't found a similar problem in any other year so far.
• All but one are from the same camera, but that's mine so hardly surprising.
• They have all been edited, but so have many others in the album.
• There is a range of different types of views - scenes, interior, close up - so nothing seems peculiar to these.

So I have a few photos that were corrupting the 'duplicate then delete' process for fixing the 'in album' bug, but I have no idea what has corrupted those photos that causes them to be incapable of duplication.

Regards all,

Stephen

As a test launch exporter the original of one of the problem images to the desktop. Open it with Preview or a 3rd party image editor and save under a different file name. Import that and see if it will duplicate. If that works with only a few to contend with the problem should be behind you rather quickly.

Thanks, OT, a good idea that I had not thought of.

In fact, I've fixed them by a very simple process of removing the editing and reverting to the original. This works even when I go in to edit an affected photo, click 'Revert to Original', immediately re-edit, then click 'Done'. The resulting photo can be duplicated.

Presumably there was something in the original editing that corrupted the photos, although I can't think that I did anything differently to these compared to all the others.

Anyway, thank for everyone's help.

Stephen

Thanks - this workaround can be a little labourious, but it works. I have about 15000 photos to place in folders so after adding the Keyword 'In-Album' to all existing pics in albums I went through the whole new Smart Album, (Keyword > is not > In_Album), and stuck to adding to only 2 Albums. After this I added the Keyword to all the pics in these 2 Albums, and when I opened the Smart Album again, there were about 1200 fewer pics in there. Bingo!

And thanks again Leonie.

I had a smart album. Configuration: "Album is not in any". This showed me all photos that are not in any album. Like this I am able to keep a good overview about which photos I have not sorted.

I created 20 smart albums (by year) and moved these smart albums into the respective "year folders" when moving the folders the photos were removed from smart album "Album is not in any". after this step there were 0 photos in the "Album is not in any". smart album

I decided the smart album by year was not granular enough, deleted the smart albums and when I checked the "Album is not in any" smart folder they did not re-appears within that folder. This is very similar to the experience DanteToTheK. I am not into running scripts to fix this problem.

I am running Catalina 10.15.5 with my photos library on a samsung T5 2GB drive. I have done a repair on the library, no change. I deleted and recreated the smart album "Album is not in any", no change. I went and deleted any albums that I created, no change. So at this point I would assume using "Album is not in any" would show all of my photos in "Album is not in any". It still shows 0 files in "Album is not in any", but does show ALL the photos as "Album is in Any".

This did work at some point and now it doesn't.