How do I merge albums in Photos?

I got this to work but when you do it does it delete the pre-merged album? I'm now left with the original album as well as the album I moved it into.... scared to delete it!

Thanks for pointing this out - I had not found it and as far as I've seen no one else on this forum has

LN

There actually is, it's just hidden under the New Album interface. Which is dumb. I am generally disappointed with the iOS / OSX unified Photos app. I really don't like the fact that the Event names do not appear as separators in the Photo stream, and the way the Albums interface is set up. They should've ported more iPhoto features to Photos, rather than forcing the inferior Photos design into OSX. :-(

Go to the basic Photos view. Select all the photos you want to combine, both the new stuff and the old. Now go to File > New Album. This command is misleadingly named. When you activate it, you'll see a dialogue box that has two widgets -- a dropdown menu, which will default to saying "New Album", and a text-entry box, which is for the name of the new album; it defaults to using the location and date metadata.

However! If you click on the dropdown menu, you will see a list of all your existing albums. If you imported your Events from iPhoto, you'll see those nested under an iPhoto Events option. The events are sorted by date. Find the event you want to merge stuff into. (Note that if you initially click-and-release on the dropdown, you can navigate the menu by using the arrows or by typing the name of the thing you're looking for. So most likely what you want to do is click-and-release on the menu, arrow-down to iPhoto Events, arrow-right to get into that menu, then type the name of the event. This may be problematic if you've used very similar names a lot. Though I think you can find the first thing, arrow-down past it, then start typing again, and it always searches forward from wherever you are in the list.)

Anyways, once you've selected the correct album, the text-entry box will go away. And then you just click OK, and it merges the new and old stuff together in that album.

This is, of course, incredibly stupid. The old way was much easier, and this is a task that I'm sure millions of users want to do fairly regularly. I'm almost impressed that the Photos developers were able to get this PoS approved for distribution. :-P

I managed to merge photos into existing albums by going to 'View' then 'Show Sidebar', followed by selecting the photos I wanted and dragging them to the specific existing album (a former 'event' as it was in iPhotos), now viewable in the sidebar, resulting in a merge.

That said, I am missing a lot of the iPhoto functions I have learned to rely on over many years.

And then you just click OK, and it merges the new and old stuff together in that album.

Actually it doesn't merge the two albums like Events could be merged in iPhoto. That workflow only adds the photos from the source album to the selected destination album. The original/source album will still exist with the photos in it.

I can't go back and just delete those few photos from the original album without also deleting them from the album I just moved them to

That's not true. If you select a photo in an album and use only the Delete key it will be removed from that album only.

However, lets make it very clear that when you say "original album" you do mean an album and not the Moment that the photo gets added to. If you delete from an Moment then it will be deleted from everywhere in the library.

See the Note at the end of this reply.

Deleting Photos from a Photos Library

1 - regardless of where you are in the library, i.e. Moments, Collections, albums, smart albums or projects, select the photo(s) you want to delete and use the key combination of Command+Delete to move the photos to the Recently Deleted smart album.

2 - use the File ➙ Show Recently Deleted menu option to go to the Recently Deleted smart album.

3 - in the Recently Deleted album you can opt to let the photo automatically delete after the 30 day waiting period is up, delete them immediately or restore them to the library.

NOTE: deleting a photo from an album, slideshow, book, etc., with only the Delete key only deletes that photo from that item. Deleting a photo from a Moment or Collection deletes ALL occurences of that photo in the library.

There isn't one. That's just not possible in Photos.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Is where you go to post feature requests.

In the meantime the best you can do is to select all the photos in one album, drag them to the other and then delete the first one.

This is a good tip. I found what you are talking about and I expected it would work, but wasn't able to. Curious if others have had better luck with it.

Agree that this is really ridiculous. Apple should have done a lot more user testing with people who really hammered on the app. There's a few of these kinds of oversights that could have been caught with a little effort.

It does not automatically delete the pre-merged album but it's safe for you to delete it, as your "new" album will contain all the photos. If you're scared to delete, just click on your "newly merged" album to verify that all the photos that should be there are in fact there. Once you've verified this, go ahead and delete the pre-merged album. It really does work. I've been merging & deleting like crazy since I read Auros' tip!

This tip is GENIUS! I've been successfully merging like crazy since I read your post! I had several albums with the same name but all contained different photos, none of which overlapped, and I couldn't figure out how to merge all the photos into one album until I read your tip. Now I'm able to put the photos together into one of the existing albums and delete the rest of the similarly named albums. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I totally agree with Auros. They should have imported just basic common sense features from iPhoto like copying and pasting select photos from one album to the next or dragging and dropping to merge. Really disappointed. This seems like the best solution to this problem so far though.

I was assuming in my description that you've just imported some photos from your phone, or from files on the desktop, and they aren't in an existing album yet.

Yes, that way works well for importing from cameras and phones. However, if importing from the Desktop or hard drive you can drag the image files or folder of files directly onto the album you want to put them in. They end up in the album as well as their Moments.

You can also create a folder to group you photos together. Say you took some pics on a DSLR and your iPhone while on vacation and want them in the same place. Select view - show side bar - then file - new folder. Then you can just drag and drop all the relevant albums into it.

Question for you: I realize I can move photo/s from one album to another and then delete the original album without losing the photos, but if want to keep the original album and just move one or a few photos to another album, I can't go back and just delete those few photos from the original album without also deleting them from the album I just moved them to. The photo/s are permanently deleted from both albums? The only way to delete the duplicates once you move the photos is to delete the entire album from where you originally moved them, but often there are other photos in that album that I want to keep since Apple just groups by date. Do you know a way around this? Had no idea I was about to lose iPhoto when I updated so trying to understand how to best organize going forward.