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iPhoto used to automatically create album for each month, but since that feature is no longer available I've always manually done it myself. However, a month or so ago I decided to use Smart Albums to do the same in Photos. I noticed the albums were gone from my phone today though I'm not sure how long its been like this as I haven't been checking. Do Smart Albums not work?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15
I constantly use smart albums to help organize and evaluate my pictures. Smart Albums are a very valuable too. I've never had a smart album just disappear in Mac Photos-- they are very stable. You should feel confident in using them.
I constantly use smart albums to help organize and evaluate my pictures. Smart Albums are a very valuable too. I've never had a smart album just disappear in Mac Photos-- they are very stable. You should feel confident in using them.
The iPhone does still not support smart albums. If you create smart albums in photos for Mac they will sync with iCkloud Photos to other Macs, but you cannot see them in Photos iOS on an iPhone, as they the iPhone does not support the smart albums. You would have to add the photos from the smart album to a standard album - the standard album will sync to Photos on the iPhone.
But in Photos for Mac you can use the Library view to access the photos for each month in one place. Just click "Library" in the sidebar, then the "Months" tab in the toolbar. Or use the search field to search for the year and the months together.
Photos iOS on the iPhone also has a Months tab in the Library view.
I know Photos for Mac has that option, but I prefer to keep them in albums because I find the interface annoying. I didn’t know smart albums didn’t work for iPhone so that’s good to know, but this doesn’t really explain why my smart albums disappeared from my Mac. Does the Mac no longer support Smart Albums either? Because I was planning on making some for different locations I’ve traveled to and there’s no point if it doesn’t work.
Occasionally I too had smart albums missing after a system upgrade while using iCloud Photos. For example, when I upgraded from macOS 10.14 Mojave to macOS 10.15 Catalina on three of my Macs, but kept the older Macs on Mojave, most of my smart albums vanished for or month or so. They came back later, but changed, and by then I had recreated hundreds of smart albums and now had duplicates. The upgrade seems to have changed some of the rules for smart albums.
Major system upgrades can change the structure of your library, so we have to prepare for unpleasant surprises by making a full backup before risking the upgrade. Only with a full backup can we revert to the previous system version, should we discover that we lost more by the upgrade than we gained by it.
Great 😭
I’ll do a test one and see if it happens again. Hopefully they’ll just come back. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my manual method.
Are Smart Albums still disappearing?
