welcome back everyone my name is joel feld thanks for watching and today we're going
to learn all about smart albums on your mac so let's go ahead and dive into smart albums
on your mac so first and foremost let's go ahead and look at the different ways to create a smart
album if we go up to the file menu within photos we can choose new smart album or we can use the
keyboard shortcut of option command and n on the on the keyboard we can also come down on the left
hand side of our sidebar and located next to my albums there's a little plus sign that pops up
if we click on that we have the ability to again create either an album smart album or folder so
if i create a smart album it gives me a couple different choices to name the album once and
then set different conditions and let's say rules of what it's actually going to put in this album
so just think of it like a very smart search based off of certain criteria photos is going
to go find those pictures and and put them in one spot for you so let's say for example
that you wanted to find every single photograph from your first iphone what's cool about that is
in this list here we can choose from a variety of different attributes or conditions so album
date created date added description but for this particular example we want to do camera model
and we're going to say it includes the words or it does not include the words or it is or it is
not so just know that with every single criteria and and category that you choose there's always
going to be a subcategory of yes it includes this model or no it doesn't so if we stick with the
theory of or the concept that we want to find every single photo that was taken with our very
first iphone we could do camera model includes and i'm just going to start to type in iphone
and when i do that um actually i'll start scrolling through the list here
uh i can see that with an iphone i have iphone i have iphone 11 3g 3gs and i think iphone here
iphone photos iphone is going to be generic for all of them so let's go ahead and do iphone 3g
so 3g is from a long time ago the quality has definitely improved um
so i'm just going to call this smart album iphone 3g photos and what it's doing is it's matching the
following conditions the camera model includes iphone 3g or actually what it should really be
is the camera is iphone 3g that way for sure it's pulling in exactly that make and model of
that photograph so if i click ok it now creates a new smart album on the left hand side of my
organization and you can tell it's a smart album because it has that little gear there
and here i'm now able to see every single photo that was taken with my iphone 3g in the top left
you can see it was the date range from september 29 or 2009 to may 2010 there's 58 photos there
that were taken and yeah so it's it's really nice for it to quickly filter out based off of that
notice i have a few more smart albums here on the left i did the same thing because i was curious
about my canon 5d that i used so if i if i right click on this smart album i can actually
look at the option to edit the smart album so let's go ahead and
take a look at this so the same criteria is there camera model is and then canon eos 5d mark iv
so it's kind of nice to pull up every single it'll see every single camera that um that
you have in your library because remember every single time you take a picture with a digital
camera it creates what's called metadata and that metadata is like a stamp that of information that
tells that photograph what camera took it did it have a flash all of the settings the resolution
pretty much everything about that photo is kind of baked in for you so you'll notice
i have lots of different camera models in here everything from gopros to iphones to canon cameras
all sorts of stuff so that's how this particular smart album is set up and so here i can see
from february to april 2020 i have all of the photos that were taken with my canon 5d mark
iv now let's go ahead and click another or create another example we'll go back into smart album
and if we look through the criteria here there's lots of possibilities you want to quickly find
very specific photos based off of the the flash and the lens that was used or just really any
kind of very specific detail this allows you to to do that um maybe the lens i want to say i want to
show every single lens that i took with i have a very wide uh focal lens of sigma 14 millimeter
so here's a great example i could say this is taken with my sigma 14 millimeter camera if i
click ok it's now gonna go and find every single photograph that was taken with that particular
lens that i have and a wide angle is kind of like that that fish eye almost so it shows a very broad
a nice wide wide angle and so you can see these are all the photographs that i took
with that wide angle you know here in israel i had a picture so i can capture that whole seating
in the background so it's kind of nice to be able to quickly find
those those photographs if we create another one smart album let's go ahead and back and look at it
file name so if you name your your photographs you can quickly find them based off of the the title
um keywords you know maybe i use keywords for my photos so i could say find me every single
photo that has the keyword arial and then this would be all of my drone pictures so all
drone aerial photos and so now if i click okay it's going to go and find all of the pictures
that i took with my various drones or that i've tagged with ariel as that and maybe i was on top
of the building and i took a picture and then i tagged it aerial even though it wasn't with my
drone that would also come in here and we can do an uh if you have questions about keywords there's
lots of different ways to add keywords to photos so that you can quickly find them other ways
also it's really nice when you're searching on your phone or within photos here to quickly find
those pictures but keywords are smart smart albums it can work in a variety of different ways you can
mix and match different photographs or different parameters so let's say that i wanted to find uh
every single photo that my son bennett was in that was taken with my canon 5d mark iv so i could say
the camera model is and i'll filter out to say canon
5d mark iv and then notice a little plus sign here if i click on that i can add a
second parameter and so then i could say okay the person is and because i named the people
in my photos i can say is bennett now the one thing that you want to change though is this match
all of the following conditions or match any of the following conditions so notice if i say
match any of the following conditions notice how many photos are there over 7000 photos
but if i choose all now it drops down to 302 so the importance of this is if i set it to any
it's automatically finding any photograph that's taken with that particular camera but it's also
finding any photograph that bennett is in but i want to i don't want that i want to find
specifically photos that bennett is in but also that has been taken with that canon camera so i
need to say match all of all of these conditions and find me exactly that of what i'm looking for
and so that's why that number drops considerably because it's only 302 versus 7000 so i'm going
to name my smart album and say um bennett photos with 5d mark iv click ok and now it's going to go
and find every single photograph that bennett is in that was taken with that camera model so it's
kind of nice it's being it's a just a really really smart search that allows you to set
different criterias so that you can find photos quickly and photos will always be added into there
so the next time i take pictures of my son bennett with that camera it's gonna automatically bring
those photographs into that smart album and save you that organization down the road
now a few differences between smart albums and and regular albums the biggest one is you can actually
delete from smart albums now you can delete from albums also but the main difference is when you
delete from a smart album it's actually deleting it out of your entire icloud or photos library
which means it deletes off your phone your ipad any other apple products that you have whereas
when you delete it from an album it's only removing it out of that custom organization of
the album the photo actually still resides in the photos library but just know that albums and smart
albums very very similar with the organization but there's definitely differences to them
so i'll take an example let's say that uh i take this picture and i press delete notice that it's
it's actually gonna warn me and say delete from all of your devices this item will be deleted
from icloud photos on all of your devices so if i click delete there it's actually deleting it out
of photos it's now removed out of my phone my ipad my other mac so just know that if you're using
smart albums a lot and you accidentally select a whole bunch that you didn't need to delete you're
actually deleting them now if i go to an album so over here on the left hand side for example
i have this apple cabinet album and if i select one of these photographs and i press delete
notice that it didn't give me any prompts to say hey you're deleting from all of your devices
it's only removing it from this album this custom organization here and if i right click on here i
can actually say show in all photos and this will take me to the photos library notice how
apple cabinet is no longer selected it took me to photos and here is that picture that i
removed from that album so an album the pictures still stay within the photos library but if you
delete it out of a smart album it's actually removing it out of everywhere now the other
question that people often have is well if i create multiple smart albums in multiple albums
i don't want to duplicate the storage or the file sizes on my on my computer i don't want to
you know make 20 smart albums and then have you know those 20 pictures or 100 sub pictures be
duplicated in every single one but it doesn't work that way all of the photos are just referenced to
the main library so you can make 100 different albums you can make 100 different smart albums
but the pictures only reside in that photo library in the main category and then they're just
a referenced to them so you don't have to worry about duplicating the storage on on your computer
so if you go back and look at some other options for smart albums so you know you
can do smart albums by an album you can do it by date captured date added maybe you want to do a
date range so we could say date added in the last 30 days so i want to see every single photo that
i did in the last 30 days so 30 days or lasted 30 days we could call it last 30 days of photos
and we could say weeks we could say months we could say years we could you know change this
to say is it in the range so we could do a range of you know february 1st to december 12th whatever
it may be so there's a lot of different ways to use these smart albums but it really comes down
to do you want to it can be so detailed but there's also other options within photos that
allow you to quickly find the pictures also so let's stick with just the last um is in the last
30 days so if we click ok here it's now going to show me the photos literally from the last 30 days
so i took 1700 photos 42 videos all within the last 30 days if we look at some of the other
choices you can do it by descriptions because you can add descriptions to your photos you can add
text to your photos as far as the title not actually like text on top of your photos
you know you can filter by person let's say i wanted to find every single photo that has
both my sons in them so i would say bennett's and click the plus sign and i could say person is also
say hudson and again either match any of those conditions or match all of the conditions
and so benedict and hudson i'll click ok and now it's going to show me every single photograph
with those two particular people in there so you can see some of the the ways that you can utilize
smart albums to quickly find stuff and and fine-tune your organization the one
thing i do wish it did was synchronize to your other devices so if you do create
uh smart albums they do not synchronize as of right now hopefully they do but they don't show
up on your iphone or your ipad so apple if you're listening please just let us sync the
smart albums because the albums do it everything else does it and it just why not just just do it
so that's smart albums in a nutshell you can actually do quite a bit with
it it's just really up to your imagination of how you want to mix and match that search criteria
so again my name is joel feld if you liked what you saw and you enjoyed learning go ahead and
click that subscribe and click that little bell and if you have any comments questions
go ahead and leave those in the comments below and i'll see you next time