We take a lot of photos with our iPhones and even DSLRs and other cameras. Photos are great for capturing memories with others, or when you just want to get a snapshot of something beautiful. Photos on Mac can help you keep all of your photos in one place, and even help you organize them.
If you have a lot of photos and videos, one of the simplest and easiest ways to start organizing everything is to make use of albums, especially when you give them good names. And if you use iCloud Photo Library, all of your albums in Photos for Mac get synced to your iOS devices too.
Launch Photos on your Mac.
Pick out the photos you want to add to an album, either new or existing.
You can choose an existing album, or create new album.
Store imported files outside the Photos library. In the Photos app on your Mac, choose Photos Preferences, then click General. Deselect the “Copy items to the Photos library” checkbox. Now, when you import photos or video, Photos leaves the files in their.
Optionally, you can make a new album at any time by clicking the + button that appears in the sidebar next to My Albums. Drag-and-drop the albums in whatever order you want to rearrange them in the sidebar.
When you have a lot of albums, it may be better to clean it all up by organizing albums into folders, which are like collections of albums. It's easy to do.
Either right-click on My Albums in the sidebar, or hover above and then click on the + button that appears next to My Albums.
Give your folder a name.
Drag the albums that you want into that folder.
Smart Albums are like regular albums, but smarter, obviously. They're great for helping you quickly organize images without the need of manually adding each one to an album because it's all automated.
Right-click on My Albums or click the + button that appears next to My Albums.
Choose the parameters for your Smart Album.
Click OK to confirm.
Smart Albums have a large number of different parameters, such as photos, faces, aperture, ISO, Live Photo, RAW, Portrait, and more. With all of these options, you can create many different Smart Albums to suit whatever it is you need.
If you're not satisfied with the Smart Album, you can always tweak the settings by clicking on the gear icon that's next to the Smart Album's title, then re-select the parameters you want to use.
Unfortunately, Smart Albums do not sync to your other devices through iCloud Photo Library, as they're only available on your Mac.
The Sidebar in Photos is a great way to quickly jump between various areas in Photos quickly and easily. Plus, it helps you find albums that may otherwise be hidden, so this was a design choice made by Apple.
However, if you are running macOS Sierra and older, you can actually hide or unhide the sidebar as you wish.
Follow the steps above to hide it (make sure Show Sidebar is unchecked).
I have a MacBook Pro running Yosemite and my Photos Library is taking 235G of space so I want to back it up into an external hard drive and delete it from MacBook Pro. I am kinda new to Mac OS systems and never really understand how the Photos application works.I have my iPhone backups on this same MacBook Pro and have also done picture/video imports via the Photos Library application.The Photos application shows my pictures / videos from 2007 up to 2016.But I am confused that when I get into Show Package Content of the Photos Library and then the Masters folder, I only see year folders of 2015 and 2016.So, my question is: From where is the Photos Library pulling together all of my media files?
One of the coolest things about Photos is that it intelligently groups all of your photos and videos into moments, collections, and years.
This means that your photos appear in a timeline and are grouped by things like location, or even event. It's a great way to take a look back at your memories and relive those specific moments in time.
The Moments, Collections, and Year views are only available in macOS Mojave and older.
Click on Photos, Moments, Collections, or Years buttons at the top of the window.
Click on a section of a Year to move to that Collection, or a section of a Collection to drill down into that Moment, or an item in a Moment to view that image or video in closer detail.
A single click on an item selects it, while a double click takes you to view it.
In the Year and Collections views, thumbnails can be small. You can click-and-hold and then drag the cursor in any direction over the thumbnails to get a larger preview. Letting go will take you directly to the image that the cursor was last on.
To replace the previous Moments/Collections/Years view, Catalina changed it to Years, Months, and Days for simplicity.
Make sure you're in the Photos section in the sidebar.
Source: iMore
Click the Years, Months, or Days buttons at the top of the window. The default view is All Photos.
Clicking on Years lets you see each year as a block. Double-clicking the year takes you into Months.
When you double-click on a Month, you'll drill down into the Days view.
You can create a new library for your photos at any time with Photos for Mac. To do so, make sure that you quit Photos and reopen it with the following method to get the Library options.
Click OK.
You've now created a brand new Photos Library. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to migrate over photos and video, so you will need to export the content you want, and then import it back into the new library.
When you create a new library, you may still want to go back to a previous library for something. Fortunately, it's easy to switch between multiple libraries.
Click on the name of the library you want to open.
Voilá! Just make sure to repeat this process each time you want to switch to a different Photo library.
If you're low on storage space on your Mac, you can just move your Photos Library to an external hard drive. Keep in mind though, that you will need to have this external drive plugged in to access your Photos Library, even if you have iCloud Photo Library enabled. And you aren't able to create a second Photos Library that has iCloud Photo Library enabled on your Mac, so be wary.
Click on the Photos Library file and then drag it to your external hard drive in the sidebar.
This process may take a while, depending on how big your Photos library is.
The Photos app technically supports the management of images that aren't locally stored within its library — that is, you can keep a set of images in a folder called 'October Trip' and manage them within Photos without having to make a separate copy of them. You can do this by navigating to Photos > Preferences from the menu bar, selecting the General tab, and unchecking the 'Copy items to the Photos library' box under Importing.
That said, reference libraries won't play nicely with iCloud Photo Library users; you may run into problems when syncing, or not be able to sync at all. So if you plan on using a reference library, you'll have to opt out of iCloud Photo Library.
I also didn't have any luck getting referenced files to sync properly with Photos — I'd delete a photo, but the reference file would stay in its original location, even after deleting it from the 'Recently Deleted' folder. Not sure if that's a bug or just not how Photos wants us managing referenced photos, but worth noting.
Sound off in the comments below!
October 2019: Updated for macOS Catalina.
You need more ports, right? And you probably need more storage, right? What you really need is the HybridDrive.
If you want your Mac's photos to wirelessly sync to all your other iOS devices and computers, you want to set up iCloud Photo Library: Apple's photo sync service lets you back up your images on all your devices, as well as access them — online or offline — on said devices. If you're willing to pay for the extra iCloud storage space, you can store an incredible amount of photos and videos, all accessible at the touch of a button or multi-touch screen.
Here's how to set it up on your Mac and get everything configured to your liking!
Click on the iCloud tab.
Source: iMore
Check 'iCloud Photos.' This will begin uploading any and all images you have stored in the Photos app to iCloud.
Source: iMore
If you routinely shoot 4K video or high-quality images on your iPhone, iPad, or DSLR, you may run out of storage space fast. (I have a 1TB iMac, but also have almost a terabyte of 4K video stored in iCloud — it gets unwieldy, fast!) This is especially true if you have a Mac laptop with limited hard drive space: It's nice to look at your iPhone's gorgeous Portrait mode photos, but not necessarily always practical to store all of them locally.
Thankfully, Apple offers an Optimize Storage option, which lets you store full-resolution photos and videos of only your most recently shot and accessed imagery; all older photos and videos are available to download via iCloud and are stored as low-resolution previews on your device to save space. You can switch between optimizing your Mac's photos storage or storing your full library locally: Here's how!
Note: If you plan on using Optimize Storage, we suggest having at least one device that stores your entire library locally (usually a Mac with a large local or external hard drive), so you have multiple backups of your photographs and video.
Select Preferences from the drop-down menu.
Source: iMore
Click Optimize Mac Storage.
Source: iMore
Full-resolution versions of your photos and videos will be uploaded to iCloud.
Apple's photo service doesn't just provide online backups and sync for your images and video: The company also offers a free sharing service that allows you to send shared albums to friends and family (or create a publicly-shared website). Here's how to turn it on for your Mac.
Let us know in the comments below.
Updated January 2020: Updated for macOS Catalina. Serenity Caldwell worked on a previous version of this post
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