Automate Marking Photos in a Smart Album as Favorite

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Level 1

29 points

Automate Marking Photos in a Smart Album as Favorite

Hi, does anyone know if this is possible to do:

I have almost 300 smart albums in Photos on my Mac (that I use to detect photos where iCloud Photo Library messes up the naming of people in my 32.000+ photos). As my other devices are doing its scanning, there frequently pops up cases where people are named incorrectly and that I have to fix. For now, I run through all the smart albums to see where new cases have appeared, which takes some time.

I was trying to create a new smart album that contains all photos present in any of these 300 other smart albums, but apparently another smart album cannot be used as a criterion when defining a new smart album in Photos.

Can Automator somehow be used to either mark as favorites or copy to a certain album photos that are contained in any of the smart albums?

I am very incompetent in the programming of automator scripts so any help would be appreciated!

Posted on May 5, 2018 10:10 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

203,865 points

May 6, 2018 12:42 AM in response to BJ4Rock

Automator support for Photos is a bit limited. You can only access top-level albums (meaning, the album must not be in a folder)

if all your smart albums are named systematically, for example, the name starts with the same prefix, you can add the contents of the smart albums to a standard album with an Automator workflow like this:

Create a new automator workflow.
Drag a "Get Album by Name" action into the workflow. Set it to "begins with" and add the prefix you are using for all smart album names. This will create a list of all matching albums.
Then drag an "Add to Album" action into the workflow. If you want to use a new standard album, enter a name for the new album, otherwise select the album you want to add the photos from the smart albums to.
Then click the "Run" button to run the workflow.

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Answer 2

BJ4Rock Author

Level 1

29 points

May 6, 2018 3:47 AM in response to léonie

Thanks, Léonie, always to the rescue!

However, it didn't quite work as I thought; it creates the new album I assign, but it does not add the photos from the smart albums that contain photos. Is there something I must add for this to happen?

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