I build temporary albums as I collect images. In time I like to merge albums (based on shared content or purpose of the images). I was able to do this easily in iPhoto - place one album icon over the other and they would combine. This process is not working in Photos. What is the solution?
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7)
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
It is better to start new threads rather than ThreadJack old threads that have nothing to do with you question - for help see
and note the about including details about your system
A few points
Photos in albums are not duplicates - they are simply a different view of the same photo in the library
If you right click on a photos in an album and remove from album then is does not affect anything else - if you Delete then it is gone from the library and therefore everyplace
LN
I opened the sidebar as you suggested and found the two events I wanted to merge. I clicked on one of the events and selected all the photos and then drug them over to the event I wanted to merge with and it copied all of the selected photos into that event. Now I'm wondering if I can delete the event I drug them from as they are showing in both places????
As Terence wrote at the top, there is no merge facility in Photos.app. There should be! (In Aperture, you could merge Events just by dropping one on the other.)
You can combine albums as many have noted here, but it's tedious. Enable the side-bar, view photos in an album, drag to target, delete source, repeat.
Photos.app has some AppleScript support; I haven't seen use of it to automate this tedious process. I don't know if there's enough scripting support.
Oh, yeah, that's correct.
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.
but be careful in deleting once added to new album. I tried to post a Facebook pic based on where I placed that photo, it doesn't show. GRRRRR.
Yes.
Yes.
Thank you!
This too, does NOT work as of 2017. Admin, please remove this response from Auros.
Has anyone found a simpler way? It's so many steps now when with iPhoto it used to be so simple. Really annoying. Who designed this set up because I think Steve Jobs would have hated this.😟
How do I merge albums in Photos?
