How to organize photos on Mac with albums, folders and Smart Albums

Albums and folders: what each one holds

An album holds photos; a folder holds albums. Apple’s example is a folder named Vacation with all the holiday albums inside it, and folders can go inside other folders. One photo can sit in several albums at once, so an album is a view of the library rather than a box the photo moves into; that comparison is ours.

Removing and deleting are different. Removing a photo from an album, with Delete or Image › Remove [number] Photos from Album, takes it out of that album only. Deleting an album, or a folder with its albums, removes them from the library and from iCloud, and Apple says the photos and videos stay in the library. Edit › Undo Delete Album or Undo Delete Folder brings them back.

Ordering. Inside an album, View › Sort offers Keep Sorted By Title, Keep Sorted By Oldest First or Keep Sorted By Newest First, or you drag photos into your own order. Albums themselves sort the same way with Control-click › Sort, and dragging one album into another merges them.

Two limits. Shared albums cannot be moved into a folder. And Apple’s pages differ on Smart Albums: the page on albums says you can’t delete individual photos from a Smart Album or from the collections created for you, such as Videos or Bursts; the page on deleting says that deleting photos from a Smart Album such as Last Import, Favorites or Videos deletes them from the library.

Smart Albums for the rules you would otherwise repeat

A Smart Album, as Apple describes it on its help page, gathers the photos and videos in the library that meet the criteria you set; its example collects favourite Portrait mode photos. Each condition has three menus: the category (Photo by default, or Title, Date and others), the relationship (is or is not) and the criteria (favorite by default, or a name or a date). With more than one condition, the Match menu decides whether a photo needs any of them or all.

Two things to know before relying on one. Smart Albums made on a Mac do not appear in Photos on an iPhone or iPad. And deleting from a Smart Album is where Apple’s two pages differ, as above; by our reading, treat any delete there as a delete from the library.

To change one, Control-click it in the sidebar and choose Edit Smart Album.

Keywords, titles and ratings, so search finds things

Keywords. Select photos, open the Info window and type in the Add a Keyword field; Photos suggests keywords used before. Window › Keyword Manager assigns keywords with a click, renames or deletes them across the library, and gives each keyword dragged into its Quick Group a keyboard shortcut. Those Quick Group keywords also appear in the Filter pop-up menu. To search, type a keyword in the search field in the toolbar; several words separated by spaces search for several keywords.

Titles and captions. Select photos and press Command-I, then Add a Title or Add a Caption. Apple says titles and captions make items easier to search for.

Favourites and stars. The favourite button on a photo marks it, and Favorites in the sidebar shows them all. Star ratings from one to five need Photos › Settings › General › Show Rating Controls if the control is not in the toolbar.

Dates and places. Image › Adjust Date and Time fixes a wrong date; the Location field in the Info window, or Image › Location › Copy Location and Assign Location, fixes a place.

Filters. In Library › All Photos, the Filter pop-up menu in the toolbar shows only Favorites, Edited, Photos, Videos, Screenshots or Not in an Album, a keyword, or a star rating. Not in an Album lists the photos still left to sort, by our reading of the name.

Cleaning up: duplicates and Recently Deleted

Apple says duplicates appear automatically in the Duplicates collection in Utilities, and that on a large library they may take some time to appear while Photos analyses the photos. With iCloud Shared Photo Library, choose Both Libraries from the Library pop-up menu in the toolbar first.

Deleted photos wait 30 days. Select items, press Delete, then click Delete: they go to Recently Deleted, which appears below Utilities, and after 30 days they are permanently deleted. Recover brings them back before then; Delete All empties it sooner. While a photo is in Recently Deleted it does not appear anywhere else in Photos. If the Recently Deleted album is locked, View Album and the onscreen steps unlock it.

Pins, extra libraries and the Finder

Pinned. Control-click a collection or album in the sidebar and choose Pin to put it under Pinned at the top of the sidebar; the sidebar sections themselves can be dragged into a new order.

A second library. Quit Photos, hold Option and click its icon, then Create New in the Choose Library dialog. Apple’s warning sits on two pages: only the System Photo Library syncs with iCloud Photos, so photos stored in iCloud don’t automatically appear in another library, and every other library should be backed up with Time Machine, though not onto the same external drive that holds the library.

Folders in the Finder instead. Robin Whalley, writing on Lenscraft, describes a system in use since 2008 for more than half a million photos: one library folder, a folder per year, and inside it a folder per shoot named with the date first in the form yy-mm-dd, so that the folders list in date order; keywords and star ratings come after. That method is built on Finder folders and Lightroom, not on the Photos app.