i have a massive Photos database.
i am trying to sort images into ALBUMS. i have a LOT of Albums.
i have put a lot of these Albums so they are sorted into FOLDERS.
i would like to be able to see my images in the following ways:
can i do this and if so how please?
THANK YOU for any specific answers
MacBook Air 11″, macOS 12.6
File -> New Smart Album
I don't believe smart Albums recognise Folders, so I'm not sure you can do the other things you seek.
What you can do is, in say, a case of a folder of five named albums, just add five steps:
Album -> is not -> Album 1
+
Album -> is not -> Album 2
etc
Set the search to match ALL the criteria.
Tedious but it will work.
File -> New Smart Album
I don't believe smart Albums recognise Folders, so I'm not sure you can do the other things you seek.
What you can do is, in say, a case of a folder of five named albums, just add five steps:
Album -> is not -> Album 1
+
Album -> is not -> Album 2
etc
Set the search to match ALL the criteria.
Tedious but it will work.
I never use Library view for sorting and such-- that's not really what it's for. If you really need to see the entire library, you can make a smart album with capture dates between 1500 and present. Then you can sort, use keywords, and so on. (But you can't custom sort in a smart album.)
Most of what you want to do can most easily be done with keywords. In the upper right hand corner is the Filter selection. The filter can be any of your keywords. So you can open an album and see only the pictures of cannon in that album, for instance:
The Keyword Manager (⌘-K) is also shown. Keywords can be moved into the Quick Group, where they become selectable in Filter. Also they can be assigned single letter shortcuts, like "c" for cannon, and you can assign (or remove) a keyword by just typing the single letter while viewing the picture. So you can open an album and arrow through all the pictures, just typing "c" on the ones with cannon.
Unlike a Smart Folder, there is no "not" choice. So I may make a keyword for "notcannon" with "x" for a shortcut, add it to all the pictures, set filter to "notcannon", go through and hit "q" and "x" every time I see a cannon, and that picture will disappear to me. It's still in the album, but doesn't appear in the "notcannon" filter. I go back and delete the "notcannon" keyword.
Cannon is a silly example, of course, but you can do this with album names as keywords, too. And, by the way, the Keyword Manager must be open for this stuff to work. I usually hide it with just the 3 colored dots showing in the bottom right corner of the screen.
Here is stuff about keywords:
Find photos by keyword in Photos on Mac - Apple Support
You cannot even refer to folders using smart albums. To find the photos "all images not in Albums in THIS FOLDER" you would have to write an AppleScript that isearching through all albums in the currently selected folder.
If you really need to know, which album a photo is in, it is much easier to use smart albums based on keywords to populate the albums with photos. For example, if you want an album with all photos showing birds, assign the keyword "Bird" to each photo showing a bird and create a smart album with the rule "Keyword is Bird". Now you will see in the info of a photo, if the photo is in the smart album for Birds, Lighthouses, or Bridges, etc.It is much easier to simply add or remove a keyword for a photo, than to find and update the albums containing a photo, if we have thousands of albums.
I don't use Library much because all the pictures are in an album. As I had said, if I need need to see all the pictures, I can make a smart album with capture dates between 1500 and present.. Then I have an album in which I can sort, use keywords, and so on--things you can't do so well, or at all, in the Library view.
When I have taken a bunch of pictures, maybe over days or weeks, I grab the new ones and put them in an album, maybe titled "23 04 Around Home" or something like that. By putting year/month/day first, the albums will alphabetize by date, even if I create them out of order. In that new album, I'll "select all" and add the keyword "23 04 Around Home." I'll also add keywords like Flower, Statue, Furniture, Guitar, Dog, Cat, OurPets, Flurry (the name of the current cat), and so on. If I had taken a bunch of pictures of Flurry one day, I might make a separate album titled "23 04 09 Flurry," and add that keyword to those pictures. I may also try to identify Favorites. The hardest part of all is to try to rate the pictures with 1 to 5 stars. It's very valuable, but I put it off a lot.
Using Keyword Manager, keywords can be added with a single keystroke--f for flurry, c for cat, or whatever.
I don't usually throw away (or hide) "bad" pictures, I just label them with a keyword. Remember, there is a filter that you can use for viewing pictures. I don't have to look at all the pictures in an album-- I can just look at the pictures of Flurry, or just the Favorites, or just Favorites of Flurry.
Once I have keywords in place, I can then use a Smart Album to collect all the pictures of my daughter, her daughter, her husband, and their dogs to use for a photo calendar, for instance.
My albums sometimes have very few pictures. More usually it's 20 or 30. Sometimes 300. That's too many, really, so if I'm going back to sort them, maybe to choose favorites, I might make a temporary album with a few that are similar in some way, and I sort a few at a time.
By the way, you don't have to have all your pictures in a single Library. I have a Library of pictures from work, for instance, that I would never need to mix with personal pictures. Well, actually, there are pictures from work that include my wife, and they are in both Libraries. I also have a Library of favorites that I've copied from the main library, and that is the one that is synced to my phone and iPad with iCloud.
Like léonie, I use keywords to organize my pictures, but unlike her I don't rely so much on Smart Albums. Most of my albums don't change-- an album for my daughter's 12th birthday won't get more pictures in it, so that doesn't need to be smart.
So I have gone through my albums, selected all, and added the name of each album as a keyword. Lots of pictures will have more than one of these album keywords, like GrandCanyon and Vacations, maybe.
There are albums which do need to be smart and, if that's an album I want on my phone and iPad, I select all and choose "File>New Album with Selection" and keyword the contents, as you suggest.
hi. thanks.
i have hundreds of albums.
i am adding a hundred more.
it cannot be possible that i have to add every single album in order to make sure i am only seeing photos that are not sorted into albums.
thus is hundreds of additions to a Smart Album and i will have to add new ones every time i creat a new album. there has to be a better way to do this?(!)
hi leonie!(!)
still learning here.
i still don't have my aperture database properly sorted if you can believe it.
so are you saying that i should reconfigure my effort here to
THANK YOU
It is alot of work for many albums. For my workflow it is worth the effort, as the keywords are more stable than albums when syncing several devices with sevral different system version with iCloud Photos. But it depends on what you want to achieb´ve and what would be the best workflow for you. I prefer smart albums based on keywords to standard albums, as I am mostly organizing my photos on my Macs. If you are doing al lot of work on the iPhone or iPad, the smatrt albums will not help, as they are not supported on iOS/iPdOS. You can still use the leywords in searches , however.
oh wait. Smart Albums are not supported on iOS? so i can't access albums i created using - well using any kind of search criteria?
so they literally don't exist on iOS?
but presumably i could use them by manually moving the smart album results to a new album? and i could put them in a "Smart Albums Albums for iOS" folder?
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ALSO, i could just bulk tag all my images in albums with the name of the Album and add keywords to each image by bulk adding the name of the Album they are in? so i could kind of cover my bases that way?(!)
hi. you guys are great. and i really appreciate this. i came from Windows and if i told you what my Aperture Database looks like i don't think you'd - well i physically moved images to individual Project Folders is what i did. so it is organize by topic by physically moving the images into a folder with that topic name.
i may have to think about adding keywords before merging now that i think about it.
ANYWAY, so i am partly through assigning images to albums.
A. i can continue this methodology? B. then when i finish i could select all the images and - well i could assign a KEYWORD to all the images in that album?
C. then at some point if i start creating smart albums by kind of aggregating keyword images into a smart folder i could select all the images rhere and create a new album?
and presumably i would out that album into a folder that says "specifically created to be available on iOS"?
some more questions please?(!)
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thanks and apologies. my brain still really needs help making this work for me even after 20 years on mac OS(!).
THANK YOU.
so i'm a little curious as to how you manage not looking in Library view.
do you add keywords as they come in so you have keywords associated with all images?
i seem to have two (or more) "non standard issues":
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if i am following (prior to reading the links you kindly sent) - well does this sound OK to you?
and i will add albums to hide from view or otherwise try to restrict what i see sheen sorting so i don't need to look through photos already in albums (since i can't tell if they are in an album they will clutter up the space but it won't help to see them because i would just be reading them to the same album "accidentally"!).
then next step once i sort is to add KEYWORDS to all images in the Album so i can use keywords as a primary or secondary sort tool as i continue to manage the database?
i mean as thumbnail does this sound good?(!)
thank you for your help. also thanks for the link. it may sound dumb but even providing the link so i cosmos make the suggestions i really helpful. so again thank you.
viewing only photos NOT IN ALBUMS?
