Smart Albums stopped filtering by text fields like it used to?

When I migrated to Photos from iPhoto, I followed the advice on these forums to use keywords (1*, 2**, 3***, 4****, 5*****) to replicate the old five star ratings. This allowed me to use smart albums, for example, to combine a date or person condition and a text equals condition (eg, ***) to create a smart album for all photos from a particular date or of a particular person with a "rating" of that level or higher (ie, *** returns all 3***, 4****, and 5*****). Then, about a month or so ago all of my smart albums structured this way stopped working; they now return zero items. I am on Photos 7.0 on Mac. Has anyone experienced something similar and found a fix or workaround? As far as I can tell there is no way to build more complex query for a smart album (ie, all photos that meet condition 1 and any of conditions 2, 3, or 4) such as I've trying to describe here.

Mac Studio

Posted on Aug 30, 2023 7:34 PM

Reply
5 replies

Aug 31, 2023 2:24 AM in response to asarmiento

Which system version is running on your Mac? Since Big Sur the text search has changed.

See: Keywords in Photos 6 on Big Sur - Discrep… - Apple Community


I have renamed the rating keywords, so the sequence of stars is right at the begging of the keyword, as described here: How to Simulate Star Rating in Photos 5 o… - Apple Community

(in the comments down at the bottom - the rating keywords suggested by jeffreyEh with a more pleasing set of keywords: ★★★☆☆


When I search for ★★★, I am getting results for at least three stars:

Aug 31, 2023 7:49 PM in response to léonie

Thanks for the reply. I am running Photos 7 on Monterey 12.5.1, if that makes any difference in terms of the way the searching/filtering works.


The suggestions and threads you pointed to are very helpful, I will try one or both of these approaches (ie, symbols or letter preceding asterices) and see if they work. It's just so frustrating that Apple broke what was at least an adequate workaround to replace a much-missed feature!


Question marked as Helpful

Sep 1, 2023 1:53 AM in response to asarmiento

Probably you know this already, but you can rename your keywords in the Keyword Manager. Just click the button "edit keywords" at the bottom of the Keyword Manager, then select a keyword in the list and click the "rename" button. This way you can easily change your already assigned keywords and turn "3***" into "***3", for example.


Sep 8, 2023 6:55 AM in response to léonie

Thanks, I did know that, though it is frustrating that renaming a keyword doesn't seem to flow through to the smart albums, which appear to need to be manually switched to the new keyword.


Just to close the loop, the advice seems to have worked, though I haven't had time to check it across all the albums I had set up. As noted in one of the comments, it does seem to take a very long time for the text to updated in the background, I mean it took days (app relaunches and system reboots did not help).

Smart Albums stopped filtering by text fields like it used to?

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.