iCloud Photos - will it retain my albums?

When you sync a Photos Library with iCloud Photos, all albums, smart albums, and folders should be preserved and will be available on your other devices. Thanks to iCloud Photos my Photos Library is identical and perfectly in sync between all my Macs. The titles, keywords, descriptions, People are the same across all my Macs. On my IpHone and iPad I am seeing the same albums and folders, but as the iPhone and iPad cannot show the titles and keywords, and cannot show smart albums, I cannot see the titles and keywords on my iPhone and iPad. The iPhone with iOS 14 can show the descriptions I added, however. They are showing on my iPhone as "Captions". See: Use Photos and iCloud Photos on multiple … - Apple Community

The first upload of my Photos Library to iCloud took roughly ten days. The upload happened, when I have not been using the Photos.app. The upload does not have to be done in one go. It will happen in the background, whenever your Mac has the opportunity.

One caution: Are all your devices using the same system version? Sometimes, after a system upgrade, or when enabling iCloud Photos on a new device, it can happen, that albums vanish for some time or smart albums will change because of the iCloud syncing with devices with a different system version. It is very good, that you already have a backup of your library. Keep making backups, so you can restore your albums or folders easily, if need be.

And I am also using the precaution, that I am adding a keyword with the name of a person to each photo in the People album of a person. In very rare cases it can happen, that the iCloud syncing of named people can cause the albums for two people to become merged. It is much easier to fix broken people album, when we can search for the photos of a person based on the keyword. That makes its say to find photos with missing people tags.

I am simply creating additional standard albums from the smart albums, if I want to see them on my iPhone or iPad.

And I have copied the titles into the description field, so I can see them on the iOS devices. I am using an Apple Script to batch change the descriptions: Script: Batch Change the Description to the Title plus the Current Description (Caption)

when you test it, try it first on a small library for specifically for testing. And be sure to have a backup before you use it on your main library.

To use one of the scripts we are posting here, copy and paste the code into the ScriptEditor window.

The Run Button is in the toolbar, the triangle: ▶︎.

You can also run the script by exporting it as an application with "File > Export". Then you can run it by adding it to the Dock.

Or install it in the user library in the folder ~/Library/Scripts/ . The you can launch it from the Scripts Menu in the main menu bar, if you enable the preference ScriptEditor > Preferences > General: Show Scripts Menu. I have added most of my scripts to this menu.

You're welcome 😊