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

I can confirm that it is still buggy, even for new photo libraries.

• As a test, I created a new library with just one photo
• and created a top level album with the photo,
• I created two smart albums, one with "Album is Any", one with "Album is not Any". The result looked good - "Album is Any" had one photo, "Album is not Any" was empty.

• Now I deleted the Test Album. The smart albums did not update, even after restarting Photos . Really weird to be seeing "Album is Any" with one photo and "Album is not Any" emppty, if there is no album at all.
• 
• The old work-around is still working. If I duplicate the photo and delete the original, the smart albums are back to normal for the duplicates. Only the thumbnails of the albums do not update, but the numbers of photos are correct.
• 

I mentioned it in the comment in the script, that we should select the photos in App Photos.

But the code is barely readable in the code insertion window.

I'll post a copy of the script in the User Tip section. There we can post longer text with a better formatting and add updates.

Script: Find Photos not in Any Album, for… - Apple Community

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.

Which dot release of Catalina are you running? Some of the users here have noticed a bug in Catalina that shows up similar to what you describe. If an album is deleted while it contains photos, those photos never get back into the "in no album" state (whether it's a count or a flag), breaking smart albums to detect unfixed photos. It is not unreasonable to think this bug could also be triggered by cmd-Z on album creation.

I do not know if anybody has tested the very newest Catalina 10.15.5 (with Photos Version 5.0 (151.19.150)) to see if it still has the bug.

I am unaware of any way to fix the photos affected by the bug other than restoring the whole library from a backup taken before the deletion of the non-empty album.

I think you ran into this problem: Problems with the Smart Album Rule: Album is not Any in Photos 5.0 - Apple Community

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 have no idea, Dave. It will run a very, very long time because of the changes in Catalina. Just to create the list of all albums is now taking hours. I could finish my income tax declaration while waiting for the script to create the list of all albums and folders.

Let it run over night.

It would really be easier to simply add a keyword "in_Album" to each photo in an album. We can easily select all photos in an album with ⌘A and then type the keyword into the Info. Then we can use a smart album "keyword is ...".

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.

Yes, GMG_Consulting, it did work at some point and now doesn't work for any photos that were in albums at the time the albums were deleted (under certain Catalina releases). Photos has lost track of how many albums those photos are in. User léonie has outlined above the only know recovery method, which is going to be painful if all of your photos are affected.

None of the older scripts that we published for finding the album a photo is in, is working right now with Photos 5 on catalina.

In particular this phrase:

set names to name of (albums whose id of media items contains pictureId)

We can no longer simply request Photos to return a list of all albums containing a certain picture or even a list of all albums, including the albums in folders. We have to write a recursive loop to collect all albums inside a folder, then recursively do the same for all subfolders. It is tedious and slow as molasses.

I tried to write a script to find all albums o photo is in, that would work on my Photos Library - it took hours to run: see

I gave up on scripting albums for the time being, after writing these two scripts: These scripts can give an idea, how to check all photos for the album they are in. It is messy.

• How to find out the albums a photo is in: Jacques Rioux's Script, Catalina Version for Photos 5 - Apple Community
• Photos 5.0 on Catalina: How to get a list of all albums - Apple Community

I modified my version of Jacques Rioux's script to search all albums and folders. It is working for my smal test library with 30 images, but I have not tested it on my main library with thousand albums and 50000 images.

The result for the small test library:

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