How to merge albums in iCloud Photo Library

Thanks for the feedback. You seem to be describing how to move a newly created album into an existing folder. What's happening to me is that each time I do an import of new photos distributed among the folders inside Lifelist, I get a new Lifelist (n) folder and within it one new folder for each album that has new content, with the album of the same name inside that -- I'm not choosing this organization, it's just the way Photos chooses to work.

So, for example, after one of my updates, I had new photos in "Royal Terns" and "Semipalmated Plovers" which resulted in a new Lifelist(n) folder within which were two folders, one for each of the two species, and within those were albums of the same name that already existed in the original Lifelist folder except these new albums contained only the new photos.

I was able to manually merge the albums by opening each new album and dragging its contents to the original album, then deleting the new albums and their containing folders. The kind of tedious procedure that computers are supposed to do for you -- instead, Photos seems to have been designed to create the need for said procedure (unless, as is my fervent hope, I'm missing something).

To add insult to injury, there seems to be a bug whereby if you delete a folder, Photos immediately becomes unresponsive and there's no choice but to force quit. At least, when this happens, the folder in question has gone when Photos is restarted. Deleting albums, though, works just fine.

Dave

A quick test reveals that for imports of a small number of new photos, it is better to import with "Keep Folder Organization" switched off and then manually add the photos to the existing albums.

I tried it with just one photo so it was a fairly trivial operation. I'm not sure where the cut-off might be, but perhaps from here on I just do this manually; it's certainly easier than having to delete all those extra folders and albums that Photos itself would foist upon me.

Dave

Here's my full workflow:

1. Take photos with my Pentax K-1 MkII.

2. Use Photos on my MacBook Plus to import the raw originals to that Mac. Note: this app is NOT connected to iCloud Photo Library.

3. Filter out bad photos and unnecessary duplicates using Photos which moves said photos to Recently Deleted.

4. Open Recently Deleted and finally delete them.

5. Close Photos and go to Finder.

6. In Finder, open the Masters folder (inside the Photos Library) and copy the new folder of photos to the Originals folder on an external disk, changing the name to reflect the date and location of the photos (if necessary, splitting into multiple folders if I took photos at more than one location). So, for example, were I to take some photos in my front yard this morning and import them, they'd be in folder "2018" in "Originals" in a folder that I'd name: "H-Aug 26, 2018 Frontyard" -- the "H" is there to keep the months in alphabetical order. At the end of each month, I consolidate the month's folders into a new folder named for the month, so this month's will be call "H-Aug 2018".

7. Make an immediate backup of the new folder to another external disk on my downstairs iMac -- I do not bother to consolidate the backups by month. They are just there in case of emergency.

8. Fire up Adobe Bridge and review the photos looking for the ones I will be publishing, that is, the ones that will appear on my Apple TV and be posted to Flickr: Dave Saunders | Flickr. I also usually post this photos with a commentary to Facebook -- when I'm being really diligent, I transcribe the commentary to Flickr, but lately I've found this somewhat overwhelming so recent Flickr photos are tagged and organized into albums, but I've been skipping the descriptions.

9. Use Camera Raw and Photoshop to spruce up the selected photos for publication -- I almost always use an image size of 2560 x 1440 to match the aspect ratio of the television.

10. These images are saved on a different external drive on another computer (a MacBook Air I call "MediaServer") in a folder called "Birds of 2018" which in turn is in a folder named "ForAppleTV". That folder is synched with my Apple TV as the source of photos that are available for viewing on the Apple TV.

11. In order to keep track of my list of species for the year, I organize the photos in "Birds of 2018" into species folders -- but this happens only after I have uploaded the images to Flickr and added each photo to my "Lifelist" folders. These are stored on an external drive on the MacBookPro.

Now we reach the point in my workflow that I have recently changed. There's another couple of places where I want to publish my images: my iPhone and my iPad Mini. The iPad Mini is new and is to some extent the straw that broke the camel's back and forced me to change the workflow. Before it came along, I didn't use iCloud Photo Library, but instead used synching by iTunes to put copies of my published photos on to the iPhone. But now, to bring the iPad Mini into the fold, I've switched to using iCloud Photo Library and so, as of yesterday, the remaining steps in my workflow are:

12. Now that Lifelist is up-to-date, I fire up Sync Folders Pro and manually backup Lifelist to another disk on MediaServer.

13. I fire up Photos on MediaServer -- it is connected to iCloud Photo Library as are the iPhone and iPad Mini. I import from the copy of Lifelist on MediaServer and it readily works out which photos are new and displays them for me to import. I check the option "Keep Folder Organization" and import the new photos.

And this is where I get into the mess that kicked off this topic: instead of augmenting the existing Lifelist folder and albums with the new photos it creates Lifelist (n) and a new set of folders and albums that then have to be merged. I spent two hours merging last evening. I thought uploading to Flickr was tedious but this is worse.

Thanks for your interest.

Dave

Thanks: I'm not trying to get RAW files to my iPhone. The photos that I publish (to Flickr, Apple TV, iPad and iPhone) are all 2560 x 1440 jpegs. There's no problem with seeing them. My whole problem relates to organization and specifically to the Photos app's propensity for creating new folders/albums rather than augmenting the existing ones.

Maybe I will call Apple Support, but I've found other messages on this forum that show that I'm not alone with this kind of problem.

Dave