Organizing Photos

Additionally, let Photos do it's People thing with its face recognition capability. Then go into each people section and check to see if has other photos that need identifying. Once completed select all in a particular People section and add a keyword to them with the Keyword pane (⌘+K).

Then make a smart album for each person with this criteria: Keyword is "xxxx". This way you have all photos that contain that particular person.

If you have pets you can do a search for "dog" or "cat" and it will bring up all photos with a dog or cat in it. You can then add the appropriate keyword. So much you can do with keywords and smart albums.

If you're going to do this within Photos you cannot MOVE photos into Albums or Folders - they will always be referenced to the main database. However, you can do what you seek and you don't need to duplicate anything. I've done mine like this:

1. Create folders for years (or whatever top line category you want)
2. Within each year create a Smart Album where, in the edit dialogue, the dates are in the range 1 Jan yyyy to 31 Dec yyyy. This will break up your mass of pictures into manageable chunks.
3. Within each year create a Smart Album where, in the edit dialogue, the dates are in the range 1 Jan yyyy to 31 Dec yyyy AND Album | Is Not | Any. This will show you all that year's pictures that have not yet been put into an Album.
4. Create whatever Albums you want, in years or elsewhere. These are the 'buckets' you describe. I've made mine to reflect events, holidays, etc. within years, together with some outside the year folders that span multiple dates.
5. From within your Smart Album(s) of 'Album | Is Not | Any', start to select pictures to put into Albums, either by dragging them into existing Albums or selecting the ones you want and pressing Command-N, which will create an Album with these photos in it.
6. As you put pictures into Albums, the contents of the Smart Album 'Album | Is Not | Any' will reduce. When they are all in Albums it will be empty. So you can keep track of what you've already done without tagging, etc.
7. You can also create a Smart Album at the top level with 'Album | Is Not | Any' and no date constraints, but that will be very big and I don't know if there's a size limit.

You can change the details and structure to suit yourself, but using the 'Album | Is Not | Any' Smart Folder will help a lot.

Stephen

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