What Is The Difference Between Album And Smart Album In Photos

[Bartolome Beacham]

Tocreate a new album, choose File > New Album. You can drag photos to this album, as you would drag songs to a playlist in the Music app. To create a smart album, choose File > New Smart Album; a dialog displays:

Note: One thing to remember about albums in the Photos app is that if you sync your library to the cloud, only regular albums display on your iPhone or iPad; smart albums only display on the Mac.

Photos will probably display memories for your vacations, but you can use smart albums to group all photos from a specific location and/or time. Say you go to a beach house every year; you can create a smart album to group all the photos from there, but you need to use a workaround.

This works because photos contain EXIF data, a type of metadata about photographs, which includes information such as the camera and lens, the date and time a photo was shot, its exposure, aperture, ISO, and much more.

In my Aperture library, I make liberal use of folders to organize my projects and smart albums. When working with projects, I'd become accustomed to selecting a folder containing several projects and seeing all the versions across all the projects in the viewer. The same way the Photos view works at the library level.

I planned to exploit this folder view to simplify syncing photos to the family iPads and iPhones. As I've previously discussed, I've disabled preview generation for my Aperture library, choosing to create previews on-demand when I need them. The plan was simple: Create an "iSync" folder containing a set of Smart Albums for the photos I'd sync. Then, record an Automator service that highlights the "iSync" folder, selects all the images, and generates previews. Periodically I would run the service to ensure photos for sync'ing have a preview. That was the plan. But as I made plans, fate was laughing.

First, let's see what does work as I'd expected. In the screen shot below I have a "2012" folder highlighted, and the viewer displays all the images in all of the projects contained within that folder.

Now, create the "iSync" folder. In "iSync", create a simple Smart Album with all 4-star and higher images. In this example, there's 4 images that meet the criteria. Also, create an "Animals" Album and manually added 7 images to it.

In summary, images from Smart Albums aren't "rolled up" into a folder view. Put another way, "manually created image containers" will roll up. Both Projects and Albums are manual containers - the user chooses what goes in them. Whereas a Smart Album is system generated based on user criteria.

My only guess as to the why behind this behavior is that the Smart Albums are generated in real time. And the programming logic when a folder is selected doesn't trigger Smart Album generation. Whatever the reason, it dashes my simple "iSync" folder approach for iPad and iPhone sync. I don't want to keep updating an Automator action as more Smart Albums get added to the "iSync" folder. Back to the drawing board on that one...

Many of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos on our Mac computers that have been uploaded over the years, which can make it time-consuming to try to find a specific one. Well, we have a solution to that problem. Did you know there is a feature called Smart Albums you can use to organize your photos automatically and easily?

A Smart Album is a specific album that will live alongside your regular photo albums on your Mac, and it will have specific search criteria embedded within it that you choose when you create one. It can also update itself so that when you add or remove media from your Mac, your Smart Album will reflect these changes.

Smart Albums are available on all versions of Mac OS that support the Photos app. This includes Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) and later. The latest MacOS, MacOS Sonoma, has many updates and improvements, including the ability to recognize people and pets in your photos and videos. This means that you can create Smart Albums that automatically group your photos and videos by the faces of your friends, family, or furry companions.

The thing about Smart Albums is that they are unique to the Mac computer, meaning that you cannot create a Smart Album on your iPhone or iPad. However, you can always transfer those iPhone and iPad photos to your Mac and create Smart Albums from there. You can also view some of the photos from your smart albums on your iPhone or iPad by using the search feature in the Photos app.

Now, the Smart Album will automatically include any photos that match your criteria. For example, if you create a Smart Album that collects all photos taken in New York City, any new photos that you add to your library that have the location metadata of New York City will be added to the Smart Album automatically. This way, you can save time and organize your photos more efficiently.

Kurt the CyberGuy is an award-winning journalist, investor and innovator who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better. Our reports contain affiliate links that earn us a commission when a reader buys independently selected gadgets and gear within our articles. This supports our work investigating technology. More about our policies.

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Kurt the CyberGuy is an award-winning journalist, investor and innovator who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better. Our reports contain affiliate links that earn us a commission when a reader buys independently selected gadgets and gear within our articles. This supports our work investigating technology. More about our policies are here.

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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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

@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. ?

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

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. -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.

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).

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.

All my photos transferred just fine from iPhoto to Photos. My albums (smart and regular) are also all there too. I'm using iCloud to sync my library to my iPhone and my iPad and at first it removed all my photos from both devices and then re-downloaded them. So now all of the photos are on my devices but when I go to albums on my iPhone or iPad there are only the regular Albums and none of the Smart Albums I have on my Macbook Pro. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Most of us have faced the problem of a cluttered photo library at some point in our lives. The Photos app shows a mess of screenshots, photos of people, events, and aesthetic visuals, and you probably don't want to let go of any of it.

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