Custom Photos albums within folders are gone after Sierra update

Question

Custom Photos albums within folders are gone after Sierra update

Prior to upgrading to Sierra I had created many albums for specific events (File > New Album...) within Photos, and placed them within folders (File > New Folder). After the upgrade, all of those folders and albums are now gone from the sidebar, however when I use the Search box I can find them and view the associated pictures. Without having to try and recall the names of all of those albums, is there a way to restore the folders and albums to the navigation pane on the left?

iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Sep 21, 2016 7:03 AM

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Answer 1

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Sep 21, 2016 7:26 AM in response to Lonnie Warpup

Not sure what you are seeing as albums and folder transfer intact from Photos 1.x to Photos 2.0 - maybe you need to hover the mouse pointer over the word albums in the sidebar and click on "show" that appears to the right

LN

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Answer 2

Sep 21, 2016 7:31 AM in response to LarryHN

"Albums" is fully expanded and has "All Photos", "People", etc. along with a few root level albums I had created. The problem is that I had several other albums (created with the menu options I specified in my main post) that were placed within folders (also created with the Photos menu options I specified), and those are not showing up anywhere in the left-hand navigation pane. If I type the name of one in the upper-right Search box, it does find the album and lets me see the pictures, but again, it is not in the left-hand pane where it should be.

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Answer 3

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Sep 21, 2016 7:35 AM in response to Lonnie Warpup

and as i posted

albums and folder transfer intact from Photos 1.x to Photos 2.0

So I'd give it a day or so to get to steady state and see - possibly you have library corruption and backing up and repairing the library woudl help

LN

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

200,897 points

Sep 21, 2016 7:57 AM in response to Lonnie Warpup

Are you using iCloud Photo Library? Did you enable iCloud Photo Library on an iPad or iPhone just recently?

When I enabled iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone after upgrading to iOS 10 and after the Sierra upgrade on the Macs, all albums and folders have been removed from the synced photos Libraries on my Macs with Sierra, after the syncing started - to be precise - all folders had been removed that contained at least one smart album. The search panel is still finding the photos in the albums, but the albums are gone, just like you are describing.

Repairing the library did did not bring the albums back. I had to restore them from a backup.

If you are also using iCloud Photo Library on a iOS device with iOS 10 it might be a similar problem.

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Answer 5

Sep 21, 2016 9:29 AM in response to léonie

I have been using iCloud Photo Library for a while now, and did upgrade my iPhone to use iOS 10 last Tuesday. I may have not noticed that my folders of albums disappeared on iOS at that time as I was focused on re-tagging faces (now People), but they were visible within Mac OS X El Capitan.

I did a rebuild of my macOS Photos library and it looks like all my albums have returned, albeit not within their original folder organization. No folders came back, just the albums. Fortunately organizing the albums into their original folder scheme is the lesser of the rebuilding task than recreating all the albums, and for that I am thankful. I'm sorry that it did not work for you though.

I don't know if the statement that "albums and folder transfer intact from Photos 1.x to Photos 2.0" is entirely correct as they did disappear, but rebuilding the library got me back working.

Now if only they would fix the problem where tagged people does not sync between devices. This was confirmed by a support agent with me last night. ::sigh::

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Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

200,897 points

Sep 21, 2016 10:41 AM in response to Lonnie Warpup

Now if only they would fix the problem where tagged people does not sync between devices. This was confirmed by a support agent with me last night. ::sigh::

That is unfortunately intentional - broken by design.

I just discovered this in the new Photos Help for Mac - the Photos Help has just been updated for Sierra, and we finally have it in writing:

https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/phtf5e48489c

Note: People identified in the People album are not synced across devices.

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Answer 7

Sep 21, 2016 11:10 AM in response to léonie

Now if only they would fix the problem where tagged people does not sync between devices. This was confirmed by a support agent with me last night. ::sigh::

That is unfortunately intentional - broken by design.

I just discovered this in the new Photos Help for Mac - the Photos Help has just been updated for Sierra, and we finally have it in writing:

https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/phtf5e48489c

Note: People identified in the People album are not synced across devices.

Good find! I'm hoping that it is more of a "we couldn't finish it by the release date" and something that will be addressed in the near future. When it was Faces, even though the actual Faces folder/UI wasn't displayed on iOS you could still search by the tagged face names that were identified on Mac OS Photos.

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