12/10/19
9:00 am

Stop Using Albums To Organize Your Photos

Most people use albums to organize their photos in the Mac Photos app. However, it makes more sense to use Keywords instead of albums. You can create a Smart Album with any Keyword. But instead of Smart Albums, which can't be seen on iOS, you can simply search for a Keyword to view those photos just as if they were an album. You can also search for words in titles and descriptions, making them useful for organizing as well.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a better way to organize your photos on your Mac instead of using Albums.
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Most people use Albums to organize their photos in the Mac Photos app. However I believe there's a better way. You can use Keywords and also Descriptions and Titles to organize your photos without Albums at all. Here's a sample Photo Library. I do have one Album in here. But I'm going to not use Albums anymore. I'm going to go and use Keyword.
So I'm going to start off here selecting a photo. I can assign a keyword to it one of two ways. One is I can click the information button here. I'll use Command i and then it says Assign Keyword and then I can type a keyword in here. So let me do that. Then I have that keyword assigned to this photo. I can do the same thing with other photos. I can select, say, these three here and you see it says 3 photos and I can assign a keyword to those as well. You can see it even autocompletes so it's easy to assign. 
Now I can also use the Keyword Manager which is Command K. Bring that up and you can see it's got that keyword already there. It's highlighted. It's blue because the three photos selected have that one applied to it already. If I select another photo that doesn't have that keyword applied you can see that it's white. So I click it to apply. I can do that with several photos and now I've applied it to all of those. So now I have the keyword Denmark applied to 8 different photos.
Now let me close this window and show you how you can then view these photos. One way to do it is to use a Smart Album. Go to File, New Smart Album and I set it to Keyword is and then I select from the list, Denmark. I'll call it Denmark and then I have a Smart Album now under My Albums and all those photos are in there. I can use that just like a regular album. The difference being that I can take a photo and remove the tag from it, do Command K to bring this up, remove that tag and you can see it disappears from the album. Or I can go into my Photos List here and I can select a photo this one and then add it by adding the tag and now it appears automatically in the Smart Album. The way I add to these types of Smart Albums is I basically apply the tag to that photo.
But I don't like using Smart Albums because they don't show up on the iPhone or iPad. They're Mac only. So let's not use Smart Albums for this. Instead let's do it another way. We can simply Search for the keyword. So I'm going to go up here to Search and I'll search there and you can see it shows up as a result there. Now you might see it show up as a location if you had GPS information for the photos. You might see it show up as a description of something in the photo. But you'll see it just show up as the plain word for your keyword there with the little magnifying glass next to it. When I use that search I'll see those 8 photos. The great thing about this is it works on the iPhone and iPad. If you're using iCloud Photo Library and then you have your photos synced that way to your iPhone and iPad you can now search for that keyword and get those same photos. Unfortunately you can't assign a keyword on the iPhone or iPad. So you need to do your organizing on your Mac. But at least you can view these albums.
Now there's one more way you can do this. You can go to the Keyword Manager here and notice there is Favorite Keywords here and I can drag and drop any keyword I want to the top there. This does a few things. One is it always appears at the top so as the list grows your favorites will be here at the top so it's easy to assign them. The other is you have a keyboard shortcut. So as long as this window is open I could select a photo and hit that key and add or remove that tag from a photo.
But another reason to use the quick group because if you go to View, Show you'll see those keywords as quick group just show up in this list so then you can easily select them like that. You'll see it say Showing Only and that keyword. You could do the same thing here. So if I have it set to All Items I can click there and I can easily select them. So let's add some more here. I'm going to go and select some more photos and add those to a new keyword here. So I can do that by either using Edit Keywords and I can add a new keyword and Apply it. Or I can do the Info box here and simply type the new keyword. Once I do you can see it appears in there and is applied to all of those photos.
Now it might take some seconds or even minutes to apply all that. You can see here if I Search here for Paris it said Indexing there so it hasn't applied them yet. It's got to go and send them up to iCloud and everything. But once it's all synced up then you should be able to search for that keyword. You can see now, just a few seconds later, I searched for Paris and it says 37 and now I can see all of these. The search result will show me a selection there and I can then click See All to see all of them. If I wanted to I can go and move Paris up to the Quick Group here and then I could select it from there to quickly jump to all of them as well.
You can also adjust the Keyboard Shortcuts there, under Edit Keywords you can see I can go in here and I can then click on the shortcut and change it to something. I can also rename a keyword. So that would rename it for all of it. So, for instance, if I changed Paris to France you could see now I could select one of these photos, get information on it, and you could see that the keyword is still there. It's just been renamed to France.
Now Searching works for more than just keywords. It also works for Titles and Descriptions. I can look here under Info and I can see I've got Add a Title and Add a Description. I could title the photo whatever I want and then I could search for that title. So you can see it appear there. 
Now what's more useful, I think, is Descriptions. You could put anything you want in here. You could describe it. You could write paragraphs of text if you want. But you could also throw keywords in here. So I could use this instead of Keywords. If I just type garden, fountain, park and I can search for anyone of these. You could see it shows up here. I can even create Smart Albums if I wanted to with searches for that. So you can do New Smart Album and you could look for Description Includes or Titles Includes. 
Now titles are useful but a lot of people complain that you can't see titles here when looking at your photos. But actually you can. You just need to go to View, Metadata, and then on Titles. Now you'll see titles here like this. But if the title isn't there it just shows you the file name.
So the one thing that Keywords and Albums have in common is just like you can put a photo in more than one album you could assign more than one keyword to a photo. So you could assign a photo Paris and garden and flower if it fits all of those and do searches on any of those. It's like having them in those three albums.
Another way to go is to not use Keywords or Albums at all but to simply search. Searches will turn up locations, people, and objects in the photos automatically. So you could search for things like flower, and boat, and sunset and see those. Then, of course a lot of us just use albums to group together some photos that are already grouped together in time. So you can look at All Photos, years, months, and days. They're all sorted chronologically. You could easily find that one from when you were on vacation without having to go and put all those photos in a special album. So something nice and minimalist not really using any albums or keywords. Just searching through your photos.

Comments: 20 Responses to “Stop Using Albums To Organize Your Photos”

Cesar Reyes

4 years ago

I see how keywords are awesome, but why are the better than normal albums? Because they're searchable?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Cesar: You can add 400 keywords without clutter, but 400 albums would be a mess. You can see which keywords a photos has, but not which albums it is in. You can quickly add keywords to new photos. Scrolling through lots of albums and dragging and dropping into albums is tougher.

Cesar Reyes

4 years ago

Ah! Got it, you talked about that but it didn't really click I guess.... genius! Thanks!

Jim

4 years ago

I’m not about to go back & add keywords to over 180,000 photos! That would be an enormous task. Albums make far better sense to me.

David Bybee

4 years ago

Thanks. I wouldn't go back and try to change out alll the albums I have. But this is definitely the way to go forward. Wish could add keywords on iPad and iPhone though. Was literally thinking about starting a couple of new albums when your newsletter cam through.

John Carter

4 years ago

I have a number of images with telescopes in them from different places. I used the "telescope" keyword in iOS and got a lot of them (maybe all), but one image was only of a nebula. I looked at the info in Photos on the Mac and there is no word "telescope" in the metadata. The keyword for that photo is "Astronomy Photos." 184 photos were found in iOS. Do the same search on the Mac and that image is not included there. Only 132 photos were found on the Mac. So I guess nothing is perfect, eh?

Jennifer

4 years ago

Thank you!!! How do you organize the keywords. I started keywords a long time ago and have multi keywords.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Jennifer: Do you mean in the Keyword Manager? They are in alphabetical order.

Nick

4 years ago

hi Gary, great idea. I'm currently using Albums and I can see how creating lots of albums can be mess. I really like your suggestion of Smart Albums, and given that I don't use iCloud to store all my photos (other than couple shared albums), I don't need to see all my photos on portable devices, would you say Smart Albums are the way to go for the Mac?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Nick: Give them a try. It is easy to select all the photos in an existing album and apply a keyword to them. Then create a Smart Album from that keyword. You can make the switch pretty easily and still have your old Albums around while you see if you like it.

Nick

4 years ago

don't see an option to use Location in Keywords to add another filter for a Smart album...unless I missed it

Rene-Pierre

4 years ago

Hi Gary, This information came in just in time as I was preparing to create more albums. My issue now is how do I keep them in some sort of sequence other than chronological. I want to make a presentation with say 50 photos how do I identify/mark/tag them so they will come out in the desired sequence not chronological or by title?

GazzaDownUnder

4 years ago

@Rene-Pierre ... I believe once you have photos within a Album, you can manually move the photos into your preferred order. Tip: I create a smart album on my Mac then I use those photos within the smart album to create a basic Album (or folder). When finished with project I just delete the basic Album. But before I do I tag the photos with a unique keyword so that if needed in the future I can recreate the album in seconds. 🤗

nick

4 years ago

Gary: I have an old hard drive with thousands of photos. I was avoiding importing them into my already large photo library on my Mac. Is there an option to have more than one photo library? If there is, would it be possible to store the Photos library on that external drive so it's only available when I have it plugged in? I was thinking of avoiding bloating my main hard drive on the Mac. Thank you

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

nick: You can do those things. You can have more than one library, but then you have to switch libraries all the time and can't view them at the same time. You can also choose to keep the photos external to the library. https://macmost.com/using-referenced-photos-to-exclude-photos-from-icloud.html is not exactly about what you want to do, but it is close.
Also, you can just have them as files. I have a video on that coming soon.
You have lots of options.

nick

4 years ago

thanks Gary, looking forward to that video (and all the others:)

Warren Marquez

4 years ago

Question: How do I find photos with NO keywords? I checked Smart Albums and there isn't a way I can figure out. Thank you!

Also, I admit I use a combination of both regular albums and keywords. I tend towards using albums to organize by specific events (a street fair I went to, a parade) and using keywords for subject categories (festivals).

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Warren: It isn't easy to do that. I have a solution here: https://macmost.com/using-javascript-to-find-photos-without-keywords.html

Adrian Hayes

4 years ago

Hi Gary
Thanks as ever for your invaluable help.
How do I delete an empty album on my iPad? When I tap Edit the bin icon is greyed out.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Adrian: Make sure you are not IN the album when you do that. Then the bin is gray because there is nothing in there to select and delete. You should be up one level, at the albums level. Then tap See All to go to the complete list of albums. Then tap Edit own that screen and red circle - buttons appear at the top left corner of each album.

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Stop Using Albums To Organize Your Photos

Comments: 20 Responses to “Stop Using Albums To Organize Your Photos”

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