Understanding How Your Photos Are Stored in Your Mac Photos App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about your Photos Library and how the photos in your Library relate to the photos you see in Albums. 

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So I often get questions about how photos are stored in the Photos App. All your photos in the Photos App are stored in what's called a Library. Your Photos Library. There's a way to view them all. But you can also create Albums and view your photos that you place inside of a particular album. But often people get confused about where the photos are actually located and if they create albums and put photos in them whether or not there are duplicates of the photos now in their Library. 

So basically when you use the Photos App you can see here on the left the top item is Library. If you choose that then you're going to see all of the photos in your Library. You can actually choose at the top here to view them by years, months, days, or All Photos which gives you a complete list. So All Photos is a way to view every single photo in your Library in chronological order with the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom. But you can also create Albums. Let's do that by going to File, New Album. You can see it's going to add it here on the left under Albums. I'll call this My Album and it's empty. It says there are not items in here. But I can go to my Library and I can select different photos here and Add them. An easy way to do that is just to drag and drop. So I'm going to drag the second photo, the third photo, and also the seventh photo to this album call My Album. Now when I select it I'm just looking at those three photos. So I'm just seeing the ones in the album called My Album. It could be confusing to think that these three photos are located here and they are also located in the Library. Are there actually two copies of them? If not, where exactly are the photos. Are they in the Library or are they in this album. 

So it is important to remember that the idea of calling these albums, that's kind of a light metaphor. Don't really think of it as a physical photo album where you would actually have the photo itself on a page in that album. In the Digital Library of your Photos App all of your photos are in the Library once. Everyone is listed here in the Library. The albums are just a different way to view these same photos. So here using All Photos I'm viewing every single photo in chronological order. But, by creating an album and putting three photos in there what I'm actually looking at is a subset of that. These three photos are still in your Library. I've just chosen a different way to view those three. This doesn't show me all my photos. Just these three photos. But they are the same three photos. They aren't duplicated. 

So here's another way to look at it. Here's your Photos Library and you can see it's got all of those photos in there. Let's say you want to create an album. So you create an album and then you want to put photos in it. Let's choose those same photos. The second, third, and seventh photo. Now let's put them in there. So now your Photos Library looks like what is on the left and the album looks like what is on the right. But the photos are in two different places and they are not duplicates of the same photos. It's more accurate to think of the album as linking to the original photos. So something like this where when you view the album you see the three photos but it's really just showing you the photos from your Photos Library.  There is not a separate copy of the photos. 

I find that some people that have trouble with the idea of photos albums can more easily understand it if they think of them like playlists in music. There is something about that word playlist that kind of makes it clearer. So here I'm in my Music App and I'm looking at my Library and I'm looking at a complete list of all my songs. Looking at songs in your Library in the Music App is very similar to looking at All Photos in the Photos App. So here I see a list of all of my songs. Now, I can create what's called a playlist here by going to File, and then New, and Playlist. I'm going to call this My Playlist. It's going to create it here on the left. If I select it I can see nothing is in it. But if I go back to songs here and I select, say, three songs and drag them into My Playlist. If I go to it I can see those three songs are there. But these aren't copies of those three songs. It is kind of understood that  a playlist is just a different way to play your music. The songs are all just here in the Library at one time but you have a playlist to be able to play a special set of those songs in a special order. 

In the Photos App an Album is the same thing. It's kind of a playlist of photos. These photos are all in your Library but this is a way to just view these three photos in this order. 

There are many different reasons you may want to use an album.  You might want to have an album and then gather all the photos from a specific event or a trip or you may want to gather photos that are of a specific type, like all photos of waterfalls or all photos of flowers or all photos of some other type or having some other meaning to you. You can have the same photo in multiple albums. So if you took a picture of a flower while you're on a trip you may have that photo in that album for the trip and you may also have it in an album of your best flower photos. 

But you can also not use albums at all. That's perfectly okay. If you go to Library here you're going to see buttons at the top or drop-down menu depending upon how wide your window is. You can view by years, months, days, or All Photos.  So if you group together by say Months you kind of get a natural listing here. The same thing by Days. It kind of groups them together according to days and location. For some this organization is great. It takes no time to do it and it more or less works. But other people like to actually create their own albums and curette their own collections of photos like that. It's really up to you whether you use albums or not or how much you use them. 

Now it is also important to think about albums in terms of how you delete photos. So let's say you want to Delete a photo from an album. It's also important to think of the terminology correctly. Instead of thinking about deleting a photo from an album, think about removing it. This word gives you much clearer picture of what's going on. So let's say we're going to Remove the last photo from this album. So remove this one. When I do so it's removed from the album but it hasn't touched the actual photo in your library. It is just gone from that album. So removing photos from albums does not get rid of them out of your Library. So just as it when you Add a photo to an album it is not duplicating that photo. When you remove it from an album it's not deleting it from your Library. It is still in your Library. You've just removed it so it is no longer in that playlist or album of your photos. 

What about the other way? If you were to delete a photo from your Photos Library. So I"m going to say Delete this one. This will get rid of it completely from your Photos Library. It won't be in your App anymore. So, of course, When you do that now there is nothing for that album to link to so it is automatically removed from that album. 

Now a question I often get about this is from people who like to create albums that include all their photos. So if they go on a trip and they take a bunch of photos. All of those go into one album. If they go to an event and they take a bunch of photos. All of those go into another album. So all the photos are represented at least once in one album. Having that they just want them to be albums. They don't want them to be in Library, All Photos. But that's not how it works. Remember all photos is a complete list of all of the photos you have. By definition every photo in your Photos Library is in your Photos Library. So when you view All Photos well you're going to see literally that. All of your Photos. If you'd rather only view them in albums then certainly just do that. Only ever look at albums. You don't have to go to your Library and view things as All Photos. You never have to do that. It's there for you if you like and obviously if you were to have a photo that wasn't in any album, the only way to actually see it would be in All Photos. But if you're constantly putting every single photo in at least one album then you don't need to look at All Photos if you don't want to. You can just ignore it and never use this view of your Photos Library. 

Note that all this is exactly the same on your iPhone, iPad, your Library, and your Albums all work the same way in Photos. If you're using iCloud Photos it works the same way. It doesn't matter if the Photos Library is just local to your Mac or it's iCloud Photos. Your Library is all of your photos and Albums are kind of like playlists where you select certain photos that you can view there, but they are not duplicates of those photos. 

So I hope this makes it a little clearer as to how the Photos Library and Albums work in the Photos App. Thanks for watching.