How do I merge albums in Photos?

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.

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 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.

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????

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you!

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.

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.😟