Delete pictures from library but keep in album

Those places called Library and Recents, etc, are not real albums--not like the ones you make yourself. These are special pre-set ways to view your pictures. The "LIbrary" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order your pictures were taken. The "Recents" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order they were added to the Library-- not necessarily in the order they were taken. This can't be changed. These albums always provide the same view so that, when something goes wrong or seems off, you (and we) can depend on them always showing the same thing, and there's no chance that someone snuck in and changed the order or removed pictures. 

So, since Library shows all your pictures, if you delete a picture from the Library (or from Recents,) it must be removed from the phone. (Of course, it really goes into the Recently Deleted view, and you have 30 days to change our mind.) 

And by the way, in Photos, pictures aren't exactly "in" an album. When you "put a picture into an album," its name is added to a list of pictures to display together when the album is clicked, kind of like a music playlist, but for pictures. So two albums can both have the same picture name in their lists (like two playlists with the same song,)  and that picture will show up when you click either album, but there's only one picture file-- it's just on multiple lists. And when you remove a picture from an album, its name remains in the lists of other albums, and the file still remains in your Library. You don't get fewer pictures in your Library because you remove one from an album; you just get fewer names in the album list.

So albums give a specific view of your pictures. The picture of "Aunt Ethel at the Grand Canyon" can be in the "Aunt Ethel" album with other pictures of Aunt Ethel, and it can also be in the "Grand Canyon"  album with pictures of other people at the Grand Canyon. And it can also be in a the "September 2015" album with other things that happened then. Each album is pointing to a single file stored in the Photos Library, so having pictures in multiple albums takes up no more storage space. As you can imagine, this is very powerful in organizing pictures.

zena258 wrote:

I have an apple 13. i put most of my pictures in albums. is there a way to delete pictures from the library and keep them in the albums?

No, you're not physically moving the photos the album, it points back to the library.

Another way to say the same thing:

Photos, (like iPhoto,Aperture, Music, iTunes) is a database. This means it can be very flexible and powerful, if sometimes a little confusing. The library is the core of the app. Every image is in the library. Albums are virtual, and are just subsets of the library. In fact, Albums are not places, they are lists - instructions to the app to 'display this group of images together'. So images do not get "moved" to Albums, they get added to that particular list. This means that an image can be in more than one album but use no extra disk space. Similarly in the Music app, all the tracks are in the Library and can be added to any number of playlists.

In a Mac:

If you're trying to organise your Library and want to find images not in albums, then a simple Smart Album

File -> New Smart Album

Album -> Is Not -> Any

will find these images. As you add them to albums they will disappear from the Smart Album.

On iPad or iPhone, which do not currently support Smart Albums:

Check out HashPhotos

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

It integrates with Photos on your iOS device and adds a Smart Album feature. Using this app a search

!#inalbum

Will find images not in an album

(Hat tip to User ukSamo for the recommending this app.)