Apple Photos (on Mac) : how to move one to an album then stop seeing it

February 3, 2024 6:03 PM

... in the Library. I am guessing it'll end up that the TL;DR for this could have been "What piece of software (that is NOT Google Photos) should I use for organizing my photos instead of Apple's Photos app?" but am holding out hope that someone might say, "Jerome, all you need to do is change this setting in Photos," and the behavior I seek can be achieved.

I am relatively new to Apple software and the thinking behind the UX design choices for the Photos app is beyond my ability to comprehend. Suspect Cupertino is too busy investing in products that actually make them money, but I digress.

I take photos and have not been in the practice of moving photos into Albums. I want now to adopt that practice. I want to albumify the hell out of my sprawling collection of photos long overdue for organizational attention. But when -- using the desktop Photos app -- I (exaggerated sarcastic airquotes here) "move" a picture into an album, it remains in the photo Library along with every other photo I've ever taken. Yes, I can navigate to said album and see that the photo is there, but AFAICT that is the only visual method I can employ to confirm that a picture has been "moved" into the album.

The difficulty this creates is: if later when browsing the Library I see a photo whose subject qualifies it to go into a particular Album, I have no way of know if I've already moved it into that same Album.

Ideally, when I "move" a photo into an album, it stops appearing in the Library amongst everything else.

If there's a better app for doing this sort of basic photo sorting and management that would better support the dead simple workflow I've described, I would gladly receive recommendations for such... except for Google Photos. I won't use that. But if there's a different way to use Photos to accomplish the same, it would be awesome to discover what that is.

Thanks in advance.

posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Hi, I don't know if this will work in all cases, but I was curious, and it seems to work for me.

I think the "problem" is that you should not be browsing from the Library, which is the set of all photos.

You should be browsing from the set of all photos not in any album (yet). [I think] You can do this with a "Smart Album", with the condition of [Album] [is not] [Any], hence showing all of your photos that are not yet in any album.

In any case, this is non-destructive and can be tweaked if a better solution arises. Good luck!
posted by zachxman at 6:10 PM on February 3 [6 favorites]

Response by poster: zachxman : it worked! Perfectly. Does exactly what I was hoping for.

Thank you so much!
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 6:31 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]

You can use much the same approach with just about any organizing tool, even those that don't have "smart" folders, simply by dumping everything into a huge folder named something like "unsorted" before doing anything else, and then browsing that instead of the everything-in-every-folder view.
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]

It's also worth noting that albums are not exclusive - the same photo can be put/found in multiple albums. Think tags, not folders.

The Smart Album suggestion is the way to go.
posted by mce at 4:01 AM on February 4

albums are not exclusive - the same photo can be put/found in multiple albums

Can be, but doesn't have to be. Every tagging-based photo organizer I've ever seen has move-to-album as well as add-to-album. Doing a move with Unsorted as the source should remove the Unsorted tag along the way.
posted by flabdablet at 10:39 AM on February 4