iCloud Photos

No, that is not possible. Only the Library is storing the photos. The albums are showing selected photos from the library. When you delete photos from the library, they will be removed from the albums as well.

You can hide photos in the library, but hidden photos will be hidden everywhere.

As a work-around - make an additional album "My Library" and add all photos to our custom My Library album. When young add photos to an album, remove them from My Library, so you can see, which photos are not yet in an album. From your own albums you can remove photos, without removing them from other albums.

I use a Smart Album with the criterion "Album is not Any" to check to see if I've moved pictures to the appropriate albums.

There will be a time when you are thankful that Library is a place you can always find all of your pictures!

mikefromcaledon wrote: Is it possible then, to change the sort order in the Library?

The order of the pictures in the Library view is based on the pictures' metadata indication of the time and date they were taken. Sometimes things like time zones may make this seem disordered. Again, the idea is that this view can always be counted on to be the same, so the order can't be changed.

Much of the power of Photos is in the ability to make our own albums showing pictures we like to see together in the order we want to see them. We can even make two albums of the same pictures in different orders! Since albums are just lists of pictures, images can be in many albums without taking up any more space.

Smart albums can also ordered as you like. So you could make a Smart Album with

"Date Captured  is after 7/4/1776"

and you will have all the pictures in the Library, and you can put them in order as you want.

If you're referring to the local Photos library on your MBA then yes, you can change the sort order in certain albums. Here's a graphic of the various sort orders available in the different albums in a library: