Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On this episode let's take a closer look at using Albums in Photos on your Mac.
So from questions I get and comments I see I gather there's some general misconception
of what Albums in Photos are.
Here I am in the latest version of Photos in El Capitan and I've got a small photo collection
here.
There's two ways in which I can view it.
One is by choosing Photos in the left sidebar.
The other is under Albums choosing All Photos.
If you don't see the left sidebar go to View and Hide or Show Sidebar here.
Now if I choose Photos here then I get everything sorted by time.
So I've got everything broken into years and I can go down into an individual photo or
move through Years, Collections, and Moments.
Every photo is represented under Photos exactly once and they are all in time order from the
first photo you've got in your collection to the most recent one.
Under Albums you've got All Photos.
This is a special photo album that includes every photo you've ever taken also starting
with the oldest one to the latest one.
Now this is just kind of a flat list here.
So you're going to just see every photo represented not broken up into years or places or anything
like that as you would under Photos.
You can create your own albums as well.
So you've got this general album here and you can create your own.
You can see I've created some there.
Let's go ahead and create a new album.
File, New Album or command N and I'll just call it Test 1.
I can now select the photos that I want to be in there or I can just hit Continue and
leave it as an empty album.
So I've got this empty album here called Test 1.
I can view my photos anyway I want.
Go here in the Photos view or under All Photos, whatever I want to do and I can drag a photo
to an album.
I can just continue to do that.
Now when I view this album those photos are in there.
They are still going to be listed under All Photos and I'll still find them here under
the Photos view but they will also be listed here in the this album, Test 1.
Now here's where the misconception comes into play.
People either think sometimes that because they've put a photo in here it is now in this
Test 1 album and nowhere else.
Or the other misconception is that they think there's a copy here because if they go to
All Photos you can see there's one of those photos and it's also here.
So now I've got two copies of the photo.
It gets even worse is if I go and create another new album, call that Test 2, and let's say
I select that same photo and I put it in there.
Now if I look under Test 1 I've got that photo and Test 2 I've got the same photo and it's
also under All Photos as well.
So you may think that you now have three or more copies of this photo in your collection.
In fact there's only one copy of this photo in the library.
You see, unlike physical albums where you have a book and you would put the photo in
the album, and if you have the same photo in more than one album, you would have a copy
in each album.
These aren't physical albums though.
These are more like playlists in iTunes if you use those.
There is actually one photo in your library but you're looking at lists that show you
different photos that are stored in your library.
So you can have the same photo in as many albums as you want but there is only one actual
photo.
For instance, let's go here into All Photos.
Go this photo of my dog Jack when he was a puppy and let's edit it.
I'm going to do some adjustments and I'm going to change it to black and white.
Now I'm going to go back up to the All Photos level here and you can see all the other photos
and I've got this one of Jack that's now in black and white.
Now if I go to test album 1 you can see the photo there now shows as black and white because
I changed it.
If I go to Test 2, sure enough, now also I see that photo is black and white because
there is only one photo.
It's in one place in the library but I have these lists that show me photos of different
things.
So keep in mind that photos is a very versatile tool.
Some people may never use Albums at all and only view their photos in chronological order
with Photos view.
Other people may not like this view and just prefer to have one long big list of all their
photos and look at the All Photos album.
Other people may want to put all their photos into albums and you can do that.
You can restrict yourself to having every single photo in one album only and then put
them together like that.
That kind of emulates how Events work in iPhoto and you can certainly do that.
It's up to you.
But you can also use Albums to put pictures in multiple places so that you can find them.
For instance, say you like to take pictures on vacation and you like to create an album
when you are done with your vacation with all the photos from that vacation.
But you also like to take pictures of clouds and everytime you take a picture of a cloud
you want to put it into an album called clouds.
Well suppose you are on vacation and you take a picture of a cloud.
Well with albums you can put that same photo into the vacation album and you could put
it into the clouds album so that you've got it in both places but there is only one copy
in your library.
You just can view your library in different ways.
One way would be through that clouds album and another way would be through that vacation
album you created.
You can always go into these albums and you can adjust things.
You can select one and remove it.
I'll just hit the Delete key there.
You can continue to add more photos by dragging and dropping into it.
There's all sorts of things you can do.
You can even rearrange the order of photos in albums like I did by dragging and dropping.
So you can, for instance, create an album that has all the photos from your current
vacation but you can also create an album that just has your favorites.
So if you want to show them so somebody and you're short on time and you just want to
show them the twenty best you can show them that one album.
Then if they want to see all your vacation photos they can see the entire album that
includes all the photos from that vacation.