Changing smart albums thumbnail

The smart albums are showing the gears icon in the sidebar, but a key photo from the album with the gears icon in the lower left corner, when viewing the albums in the Albums view (View > Albums).

When viewed this way, the key photo will be the last (most recent) photo in the album. Sometimes I am forcing a different key photo by simply duplicating the photo I want to see as the key photo. To make this copy the last photo in the smart album I add 1000 years to the date of the copy.

For example: Three smart albums in the Album view. The last two albums are having custom key photos.

The gear icon is in both places for me.

Yes, but only the albums view will show the key photos as the thumbnail.

When I duplicate the photo I want and change the date, it removes itself from Smart Album I have it in.

If your smart albums are solely based an the capture date, change the date of the duplicate to the last possible date that matches the date and time for the smart album.but write the correct capture date into the description field, so can look it up.

My smart albums are mostly based on keywords, so the dates do not matter. To see all photos from 2013 I am using the years view in Photos.

As far as I am aware you can not - with the latest version of Photos I have no key photos on smart albums, just a gear symbol so we seem to be seeing different things than I am

LN

so you have no key photo either - i do not believe that there is a key photo for a smart album - which given the extremely dynamic nature of them makes sense

LN