Permanently moving photos to an album

> Thats what I want my pictures to do!!!!!!!!

I get what you're asking for. However, as has been noted, that isn't how Photos works. The 'Library' isn't 'boxes in the shipping dock', it's the entire building. Does this book (Picture) exist anywhere in the building? then it's in the Library. Your box on the shipping dock is more akin to an album filtered by day.

That said, what you really want is a way to identify Photos that aren't in any album. That can be done via AppleScript. Here's an example:

Copy this script into Script Editor and click Run:

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use scripting additions
use framework "Foundation"

property uncategoriesPhotosAlbumName : "Uncategorized Photos"

tell application "Photos"
	set all_photos to current application's NSMutableOrderedSet's orderedSetWithArray:(get id of every media item)
	repeat with each_album in (get every album)
		set albumPhotos to (current application's NSArray's arrayWithArray:(id of media items of each_album))
		set uidFilter to current application's class "NSPredicate"'s predicateWithFormat_("NOT self in %@", albumPhotos)
		tell all_photos to filterUsingPredicate:(uidFilter)
	end repeat
end tell
set uncategorized_photos to all_photos's array() as list


tell application "Photos"
	try
		delete album uncategoriesPhotosAlbumName
	end try
	
	set _uncategorized to make new album named uncategoriesPhotosAlbumName
	repeat with each_photo in uncategorized_photos
		add {media item id each_photo} to _uncategorized
	end repeat
end tell

It starts by grabbing the ID of every photo in your library. It then iterates through the albums getting a list of photos in each album and eliminates them from the main list. What's left is a list of photos that aren't in any album.

The script then clears out the album "Uncategorized Photos" (if it exists), then creates a new Uncategorized Photos album and adds the photos from step 1 into it. At the end of the day, this will be your set of photos that you can choose to categorize/place in an album (or not, as you wish). Clearly it's not dynamic, but ou can repeat running the script any time to refresh the album.

The script takes less than a second to filter my Library (21k photos) and 14 discrete albums. The rest of the time depends on how many photos are 'uncategorized'.

The script doesn't affect the main Library at all, and it doesn't delete any photos, so should be safe.

Hold your horses there. I think you misunderstand the intent and purpose of the Photos library, and how they relate to albums.

The main Photos Library is meant and intended to be a repository for all your phones. ALL of them. Technically, this is the ONLY place that any individual photo actually exists in Photos.app.

This library is indexed, searchable, filterable.

Individual Albums are subsets of the Library that you use to categorize your photos in whatever way makes sense to you (Date, location, subject matter, whatever you like). The photos still exist in your library, and the album is just a way to filter them.

Think of your Photos Library as akin to a Public Library. The Library is the repository for all books.

Within the library are stacks of bookshelves, each dedicated to a different subject matter - True Crime, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Kids, etc.

The individual bookshelves ('albums') are a subset of all the books (photos) in the library, but they still exist in the library. You cannot remove a book (photo) from the Library without removing it from the bookshelf (album) that it is in.

(granted, not a perfect analogy since Photos allows a single photo to exist in multiple albums, unlike a book in a library, but I hope you get the point).

So, no, you cannot remove photos (books) from the Library and still have them in the album (bookshelf).

If you don't like that model, then Photos.app is not for you. However, I don't see this as a major blocker, unless I'm missing something - just don't use the main Library category if you don't want to see all photos at once.

Adding a photo to an Album takes a minuscule amount of storage, just enough to point to which photo in the library is to be included. That same photo can be added to a second folder by adding a second pointer to the same library photo. (Think of Aunt Florence on vacation in Italy being filed in "Aunt Florence", "Vacation", "Italy", and maybe "Alps".)

I agree that it would be nice if there were easier ways to keep track of which photos were already in one or more Albums. At least in the latest versions, the Info box for a photo will tell you "Included in XXX" (where XXX might be a name or "NN Albums") below the map if applicable.

As we keep saying on here:

An Album is not a place. You never move a picture to an album. An Album is a list. In effect, it's an instruction to the app to display this bunch of photographs together. So you can add a picture to an Album, but you can never move one to an Album.

All Apple's media management apps work like this. So, bluntly, the common sense approach is for you to use an app that works the way you prefer, rather than expecting Apple to upend their approach just for you.

Vnshgpt wrote:

Thats what I want my pictures to do!!!!!!!!!

• And what would you want to happen when you delete an Album. Your proposal would be to delete your pictures and most users would not expect that. The Library analogy is the same one used for Music where you have songs in a Library and can add them to multiple Playlists. You also would not want deleting a playlist to remove every song you had. This consistency across apps is important.
• What would you want to happen if you wanted the same photo to be in more than one Album. Your proposal would require duplicating the photo and double your storage. That would be a very inefficient use of your Storage Space especially when it may be limited on an iPhone. Currently with the library, the photo is not duplicated and just a link to the original photo.
• With your suggestion of using All Photos, should it show duplicate photos that are in multiple albums.
• When you check for duplicate photos, should it delete the photo from one of your albums and if so, which one. Would a duplicate photo check even be feasible? Would you always have to review every album to make sure you want the same photo there? You obviously put it there for a reason, so should you have to exclude that photo from a duplicate check.

The Apple Photos app works very well and has not only been consistent with previous versions, but also all apps that manage a Library. A change that would result in photos being lost when deleting an Album would be catastrophic. I frequently add and delete albums to be shared with others and the process is simple without any loss of photos. If that does not work for you, the best option is to find one that does. There are many apps in the App Store that can be used to manage your Photo Library, so you can check them out to see if they would work better for you.

No, I understand your point perfectly. I just have no control over how Apple implements things in Photos. The best I and the other volunteer user responders here in the Support Communities can do is describe how things work today, how you can work with them, and to agree that some things could be simpler.

Going deeper, I could tell you how your request (however reasonable it may seem) conflicts directly with the deep design principles of the Photos library implementation as we can deduce it, but I know you don't want to hear about that.

Oh, and I can tell you how to let Apple developers know what you want to see done differently.

Click on this link: Feedback - Photos - Apple and fill out the form.

They won't reply to you, but they do have people charged with reading submissions and forwarding summaries to people with the authority to make changes.

What you want is a file manager rather than a digital asset management app where a database keeps track of the photos and where they are added to. With a file manager you need to duplicate the photo to add it to another album or project which doubles the space taken on the device.

On a Mac in Photos it's easier, imo, to see how Photos manages photos.

I don't know of any file managers for an iPhone.

Does AppleScript run on iOS?

And if the user is on a Mac then a simple Smart Album will find all the images not already in an album:

File -> New Smart Album

Album -> is not -> Any

Then use an app that works the way you want. There are others. Go search.

Fair - AppleScript isn't going to run on iOS. I missed that in the OP.

Nice call on the Smart Album, though. I missed that one. Quicker than my script, too :)