Can a smart album select only photos inside a folder hierarchy?

That is the point, he has two top level folders "Pictures I care About" and "Pictures Wife Cares about". He would like to be able to search in those two hierarchies *without* listing the albums in each one separately.

OP:

You will have to submit feedback, and don't hold your breath.

Product Feedback - Apple

ETA:

I assume you can albums of the same name in two separate folders. What happens when you say "Album is CommonNameIn2Folders"? Does the smart album just get everything from both folders?

Select all photos in your albums of interest to you and add a unique keyword (like your name) to all the photos. Do the same to the photos that are just for your wife but use here name - Caption Obvious talking.

Then make a Smart Album with the criteria: Keyword is "your name"

This will have all of the photos that are only of interest to you.

Do the Same for your wife's photos.

As you add new photos to the library give them the keyword that you want. If both of you are interested in a photo add both keywords.

Mick_M wrote: Could somebody please check if this capability is available in Sequoia - ideally also posting a screenshot similar to the one here that pertains to Sonoma:

Are you asking if Date Range has been removed? The answer is no.

As Keith Barkley, said, there is no "Folder-is" choice. But you can do 10 "Album-is" criteria (or more) if you like. That can take a while to fill…

Mick_M wrote:… Kind of a silly oversight to add the folder capability without the corresponding smart album feature, sigh.

But, I just add a keyword to everything in my version of "Her-only," perhaps HerOnly, and then search on the keyword. Some pictures might have HerOnly and MeOnly, but it works fine.

Keith Barkley wrote:

I answered my own question in Photos for Big Sur

In the dialog you drill down via the folders to the individual albums, so you pick a unique album even it is the same name as some other album.

Exactly. It the same, when we want to refer to a specific album in an Apple Script, we have to specify the full path to the album, naming all enclosing folders and nested subfolders.

I tested, if a text rule can find the items inside the albums in a folder, by searching for the text of the folder name. But that does return nothing.

My test has been on macOS 15.3.1 Sequoia, so no, we still cannot reference folder names in smart albums on Sequoia.

But using keyword is not really that much extra work. And it will have the added bonus, that the keywords will be exported with images and videos, when you export backup copies. It is the easies way to save the structure of your library outside of the Photos library. My keywords have survived all major changes, when migrating my photo libraries from iPhoto to Aperture to Photos, through all versions of Photos, while the smart albums did not survive the migration from Aperture to Photos.

With Hash Photos on my iPhone, I can even recreate the smart albums based on the keywords on my iPhone.

Big Sur will let you do it by Album. I don't see anyway to search within a folder.

I answered my own question in Photos for Big Sur

In the dialog you drill down via the folders to the individual albums, so you pick a unique album even it is the same name as some other album.