Smart Albums - Any, All, Cascaded Conditions?

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Level 1

6 points

Smart Albums - Any, All, Cascaded Conditions?

Hey everyone,

I've been using iPhoto for many years and have organized my library mostly with Smart Albums. Typically I would have a smart album by month, and then an album for high rated pictures by month. For the second album, there would be two conditions; the first would obviously be a date range, and the second would be "Higher than 2 Stars". This was a simple, effective way to find the best pictures by date.

Now with the change to "Photos", I'm kinda stuck. There are no more ratings, they're now keywords. As in, anything that was rated 4 Stars before now has a keyword of "4 Stars" attached to the photo. At a glance, this seemed like an OK substitution. However now I've got a problem with all my smart albums because the condition "Higher than 2 Stars" no longer exists.

So I can still create the first date condition easily. However, I can't create a condition like this:

Date [AND] 3 Stars [OR] 4 Stars [OR] 5 Stars.

It appears that the conditions are either ANY or ALL conditions with no nesting, such as available with iTunes Smart Playlists.

Has anyone come up with a workaround for this?

Thanks.....

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 30, 2015 7:19 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,773 points

May 30, 2015 7:28 AM in response to fatnecks

No, there are no nested smart rules, only all or any.

You could apply all ratings (1 star, 2 star, 3 star, 4 star, 5 star,) to your 5 star photos, so that 5 star photo will respond to a 3 star search as well.
And 1 star, 2 star, 3 star, 4 star) to your 4-star photos.

Then you can ask for the date range and the rating 3 star.

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Answer 2

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

May 30, 2015 9:03 AM in response to fatnecks

Not a feature - tell apple - https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

LN

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

194,773 points

Jun 1, 2015 8:29 AM in response to fatnecks

I found a new work-around, that will work for "rating is equal or better than", but it requires to rename the keywords that Photos assigned, see this User Tip:

How to Simulate Star Ratings in Photos

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Answer 4

R C-R

Level 6

17,782 points

Jun 1, 2015 9:03 AM in response to léonie

léonie wrote:

No, there are no nested smart rules, only all or any.

You could apply all ratings (1 star, 2 star, 3 star, 4 star, 5 star,) to your 5 star photos, so that 5 star photo will respond to a 3 star search as well.

And 1 star, 2 star, 3 star, 4 star) to your 4-star photos.

An alternative is to add unique keywords that explicitly duplicate the OR function, for instance by adding a "4or5" keyword to every item with a 4 or 5 star keyword. That can be used in combination with one or more AND (all) criteria in smart albums, or as a search term. That still allows searches & smart albums based on something like "3 Star" not to show higher rated items when that might be undesirable.

Of course, all these workarounds require adding or changing keywords to solve the nested AND/OR issue, so it would be nice if Apple added a feature to Photos to make this unnecessary. Personally, what I would like to see is adding smart albums to the "Album is ..." list, so that for instance it would be straightforward to use a smart album set to include various ORed (any) items, keywords or not, as an "Album is <that smart album>" criterion along with any other AND (all) criteria to accomplish this.

I have sent Apple feedback requesting this & hope others will do the same. (hint, hint) 😉

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Answer 5

léonie

Level 10

194,773 points

Jun 1, 2015 9:12 AM in response to R C-R

Your combination keywords are nice, if you want to preserve the original Apple keywords, but it is error prone to have to apply more than one keyword to keep the scheme up consistently.

The beauty of the custom keywords "4****" is, that I only need one keyword to be able to search for the exact rating four stars, but can as well search for at least four stars with a single rating rule.

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