Place Hidden Photos in Shared Albums With No Subscribers

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Level 1

34 points

Place Hidden Photos in Shared Albums With No Subscribers

Some time ago "hidden" photos ceased to be view-able in Albums which was a great way to remove misc photos from general photo timelines. This caused hidden photos to be collected in one large "Hidden" folder under Library rather than organized in albums for various categories of photos which are not desired to be in general timeline.

To overcome this, 2 things have been handy:

1) Use Smart Albums to create folders with keyword searches which include "keyword is xxx" and "photo is Hidden" (make sure to select "Match all." I like to create 2 Smart Albums for each topic (e.g. "Business Cards *" and "Business Cards **." A single "*" is a Smart Album, Two "**" is where I add the "Photo is Hidden" criteria, and no asterisk denotes a standard non-smart album. I capture the photo through keywords in Smart Albums, manually sync to non-smart album, and if I want them out of my prime timeline, I hide them to get them and then see them in double asterisk folder.

2) Problem now is you can't see Smart Albums on other devices so the organized hidden photos are no longer visiable on iPad, iPhone, etc. What does work however is to create Shared Albums and manually sync a Smart Album to a folder in Shared Album. This creates a copy of the photo, not a link, and places it in the shared Albums. The trick is to not share the album with others and it shows up on all your IOS devices just fine.

All of these gymnastics can be avoided if Apple would add support for Smart Albums to be synced across all devices.

Posted on Apr 9, 2018 9:37 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,639 points

Apr 9, 2018 10:41 AM in response to jhaggard

What does work however is to create Shared Albums and manually sync a Smart Album to a folder in Shared Album. This creates a copy of the photo, not a link, and places it in the shared Albums.

That is clever work-around. Only remember, that the shared photos will be reduced in size, so you will not have the the photos in their original quality in the shared albums.

I am using a second photos library for photos that I do not want to be visible in my main library, but need to keep organized. I do not want these photos on my mobile devices anyway.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

215,694 points

Apr 9, 2018 9:55 AM in response to jhaggard

All of these gymnastics can be avoided if Apple would add support for Smart Albums to be synced across all devices.

Don't tell us. We're just users like yourself. Tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html.