Efficient photo organization in iOS: Seeking Solutions for organizing Large Photo Collections into Albums and Removing from Recents

Photos has intentionally been designed this way.

There are two flavours of albums in Photos - the albums we create ourselves ans the albums created by photos for us.

• The albums in the Library part of the list of albums are populated automatically by Photos for us, based on all photos in the library. Each of them is showing us a selection of photos according to rules, specific for this album and has a fixed sort order. the only way to change these albums is todelete the photos from the library, and that will remove the photos from all albums. Use the Library as the foundations to build your own albums on top of them.
• We can define folders and albums and sort the items in tour own albums freely. we can remove photos from our own albums without deleting them from the library.

You may want to try this work-around: To achieve what you want to do, create your own album "My Recents" and add all recent photos to this album. Then use "my Recents" as the starting point to distribute your photos and remove the photos from my Recents when you are done.

Or use the Favourite Heart ♡ to tag the photos you have added to an album, so you can see at a glance, if a photo is already in an album. This will work, if you only want to add Favorites to albums, as I am doing - I want to keep the albums small and manageable, particularly on an iPhone with the small display.

Previously, it has been easy to remove photos from the Library albums like Recents, without deleting them outright. We could simply hide photos we already had added to an album. They would remain visible in the albums, but be hidden from the library. But many users complained and wanted to use the "Hide" button to keep confidential photos secrete. Finally Apple changed the way hiding is working. We can now keep confidential photos secret by hiding, but have lost the ability to remove photos temporarily from the Library section, but keep them in the albums.

So, you have a Mac? Then the best thing to do is to work on the Mac. Photos for Mac has Smart Albums, and you can make an album with criterion Album is not any to find pictures that aren't in any album.

You can also add keywords, like "Family" so that, with a Smart Album Keyword is Family you can collect all those together. Using Date Captured is in the range 1/1/2015 to 12/31/2015 you can collect all the pictures taken in 2015 for an album. Or you can have albums for events and have the events in folders.

I use iCloud Photos to synchronize the organization on my Mac with my iPhone and iPad. It's quite smooth.

I have several Libraries, but the System Library that syncs with iCloud is smaller and has only my Favorites-- the ones I want to see on my phone.

If you are using iCloud Photos you can easily clean up the recents album and keep the photos in the albums. You just have to enable the Shared iCloud Photos Library and you will have two separate Photos Libraries on your iPhone - a personal library, a shared library, and a toggle switch that lets you see both libraries together or separately. See: Using the Shared iCloud Photos Library to have two separate libraries on all devices - Apple Community

Once you have added photos to an album move them to your Shared iCloud Photos Library. They will vanish from the Personal library and you have a clean recents while you are only viewing the personal library. To see all photos from both libraries combined, set the view to "Both Libraries".

This will work, if you do not need the Shared library to share your photos with your family.

I am using the Shared Library as my gallery, where I am keeping all photos that I want to show to someone, also to share photos between both my AppleIDs.

Seems like this app

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/hashphotos/id685784609

might be useful with its various in-built searches.

Exactly. If we could refer to smart albums in the rules for a smart album, we could define a smart album that is not computable and might make Photos crash.

I am not sure about the reasons for not allowing mixed and-or rules. I used them a lot in iTunes for smart playlists and loved them. In Photos I am trying to create and-or layers by combining the Filter with smart albums. The filter can combine several keywords with "and" and use tis to modify a smart album with an "Or" rule.

léonie, (continuing off-topic )

I also use filters in conjunction with smart albums, but the filters don't do "not!" So I have keywords like "NotFav" to help me -- I have a smart album that selects not NotFav, and I use a NotFav shortcut to go through an album and eliminate some pictures, go back and eliminate some more, and winnow them down until I can mark all that's left as favorites. Same sort of thing with star ratings. Crazy double negative use!

Most albums let you "Select All," but Recents doesn't. It looks like you can slide your finger down, and it auto-scrolls though the whole list-- you'd have to be patient, but it works. Then you select "add to album."

I understand completely. This is the feature of android that I really REALLY miss. I download a lot of gifs and memes and take a lot of screenshots and I miss how android would automatically put these in their respective folders “downloads” and “screenshots” WITHOUT putting them also in the main “Camera Roll”. I feel like it’s such a simple feature and a simple ask for Apple to do us this service. It makes it very overwhelming for me to find a specific pictures I’ve actually taken if I have to sort through thousands of downloaded photos and screenshots.

Richard, keywords and smart albums are great in Photos for Mac, but as OCJayy mentioned Android, I suspect, the question is about Photos on iOS, not macOS.

I am missing the good old times, when we had separate forums forPhotos iOS and Photos on macOS.

Right, it gets confusing--and embarrassing! But he did say, "I own the entire Apple ecosystem," so, in that case, I would pop over to the device that makes organizing pictures easier. I want so much to use keywords and smart albums on the phone!

Me too! It is high time that the syncing of our Photos Libraries with iCloud iPhotos s a full syncing, with titles, keywords, captions, and smart albums. Most of my albums are smart albums, and I have to duplicate them as standard albums to be able to see them on my iPhone and iPad. That is error prone and wasteful.

For the time being I am only organising my photos on my Macs, and are using the iPhone and the iPad only as a viewer.

léonie,

Also, I copy smart to standard in part because smart albums can't refer to another smart album. (I can see infinite loops causing chaos!) So that's the only way to get and/or queries: smart-standard-smart. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess that's why they don't allow mixed ands and ors in a single smart album.