Create Year Smart Albums to Organize Your Photos More Easily
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Smart albums are an excellent way to organize your photos more easily. Specify certain conditions and voila! smart albums will automatically group photos by the criteria you selected. And if you import photos at a later date that meet those same conditions, they will automatically be added to the same smart albums.
Smart albums differ from albums. Smart albums are automatic and will automatically search your entire Apple Photos Library and add the photos that meet the conditions you specified. Albums are manually created and you have to add the photos to the albums.
Since it’s a new year ~ Happy 2022! ~ it’s the perfect time for creating a new year smart album. Year smart albums are helpful for breaking down your photo organizing project into smaller parts. In this case, all your photos from the year specified will be grouped together. This allows you to view a small segment of your photos library and easily delete, favorite and find photos you’d like to add to albums, such as a special event album or trip album.
A bird’s eye view of a specific year also offers you a year in review to enjoy…scroll through the photos to see what you experienced in a particular year. Be reminded of fun moments, special occasions and best of all, see the smiling faces of the people and pets you adore.
In the steps below, I’ll walk you through creating two smart albums in the Photos application on your Mac computer, one for 2021 and another for 2022. The 2021 smart album will help you organize last year’s photos if you haven’t yet done so. The 2022 smart album will set you up for photo organizing success in 2022.
Create Year Smart Albums
Open the PHOTOS app on your Mac computer
Click the FILE menu
Click NEW SMART ALBUM
For Smart Album Name: type the year, i.e. 2021
For Match the Following Condition: click PHOTO to open the menu, then click DATE CAPTURED
Click IS to open the next menu, then click IS IN THE RANGE
Change the date range to the following: 1/1/2021 to 12/31/2021
Click OK
The 2021 smart album displays in the left sidebar beneath My Albums. Now repeat the steps to create a smart album for 2022. Click each smart album to see all the photos you’ve taken. As you take more photos this new year, they will automatically be added to the 2022 smart album.
Please note smart albums only display in the Photos application on Mac computers, not on iPhones or iPads.
Another smart album I like to create is one showing the photos from a specific year that have not been added to any albums. This is a great tool if you’ve partially organized your photos and added some photos to albums, but not all the ones you think should be in albums.
Create Year Smart Albums of Photos Not in Albums
Click the FILE menu
Click NEW SMART ALBUM
For Smart Album Name: type the title, i.e. 2021 Photos Not in Albums
For Match the Following Condition: click PHOTO to open the menu, then click DATE CAPTURED
Click IS to open the next menu, then click IS IN THE RANGE
Change the date range to the following: 1/1/2021 to 12/31/2021
Click the plus (+) icon
Click DATE ADDED (in the second row) to open the menu, then click ALBUM
Click IS to open the next menu, then click IS NOT
Click OK
*An important note about creating year smart albums of photos not in albums:
The steps above work correctly if you are using the Photos application in Big Sur (macOS 11) and Mojave (macOS 10.14).
If you are using Catalina (macOS 10.15), the smart album will display photos not in albums. However, there is an exception. If you previously created an album and added photos to it, then deleted that album with the photos in it, those photos will not display in the smart album. The photos are located in your photos library but not recognized by the smart album. This is a bug I noticed while organizing a client’s photos in Catalina. I then tested all three versions of the Photos application and found that the problem only occurs in Catalina. I’ve sent feedback to Apple in hopes that this issue will be fixed.