Originally published at: New Organizational Features in Photos in macOS 15 Sequoia - TidBITS
Apple’s release notes for updates to macOS, when they provide any details at all, are by necessity brief because they encompass so many bundled apps. The notes operate more as a suggestion—“Take a look at the new features in Photos“—than as a description. You might learn that “Utilities includes additional helpful collections like Documents, Receipts, and more, and items you’ve recently edited, viewed, and shared.” But that won’t give you a feel for what actually appears in those collections, how well Photos populates them, or if they might be useful in your workflow.
I admit to being a casual Photos user, lacking the time or inclination to create albums, apply keywords, or much else. I have over 47,000 images in my library, but more than 7,000 are iPhone and Apple Watch screenshots that I’ve taken for articles and synced through iCloud Photos. I keep them in the likely misguided belief that historical screenshots could be useful in the future, though it hasn’t been so far. Although I usually delete accidental photos and occasionally cull near duplicates, I figure more serious organization is a task for retirement.
As a result, I haven’t paid close attention to what Apple has done with Photos in macOS 15 Sequoia. However, the release notes about Photos in macOS 15.4 caught my eye, and when I was trying to see how those new features worked, I realized that Photos had changed more in Sequoia than I had realized. Where did the Days collection come from? Photos now identifies receipts? How does Apple determine what should appear in Featured Photos (and why is it so utterly random)?
So let’s look at the new organizational features in Photos in Sequoia in more detail than Apple provides. Perhaps you’ve already explored these features, but if you’re like me and seldom venture beyond the main Library grid, you appreciate the new organizational features, which you’ll mainly find in the sidebar.
Top-Level Groups
The top level of the Photos sidebar now provides entries for Library, Favorites, Map, Recently Saved, and Recently Deleted. The first three are self-explanatory, but if you happen to be looking at Photos in macOS 15.3.2, you may be confused because Recently Saved appears above Map, and Recently Deleted doesn’t show up at all.
In macOS 15.4, Apple promoted Recently Deleted from Utilities to the top level and deleted a weird duplicate of Recently Saved that was under Utilities. Perhaps Apple has market research showing that these are heavily used, but it seems odd to highlight the equivalent of the Trash.
I was also briefly confused by Recently Saved. It doesn’t contain images that you have saved from Photos but those you have saved into Photos from other apps, like Mail, Messages, or Safari. (In contrast, Recently Shared in Utilities contains images you have shared, not those people have shared with you.) Apple says that Recently Saved also includes photos and videos sent to you using AirDrop but doesn’t mention that it also includes all iPhone and Apple Watch screenshots. Plus, it includes any images you drag into Photos from the Finder, even though those also appear in Imports under Utilities (as do Apple Watch screenshots).
Because I take so many screenshots and rarely save images from other sources, Recently Saved does nothing for me that Screenshots (under Media Types) and Imports (in Utilities) don’t do better. Even for others, I remain dubious about the real-world benefit of putting Recently Saved and Recently Deleted at the top level of the Photos sidebar—they make more sense in Utilities.
Collections
The very first new feature Apple described in Photos for Sequoia was Collections, which “automatically organize your library by helpful topics in the sidebar, like Days, Trips, People and Pets, and Featured Photos.” They’re a mixed bag, but at least they haven’t changed since Sequoia’s release.
Some Days of Our Lives
In Days, you see a thumbnail for each day (as shown in the top screenshot below), and double-clicking it shows a summary of what Photos thinks are the best photos from that day. To see all the photos, click All in the toolbar (as shown in the bottom screenshot below).
You will likely notice significant gaps in the days listed—Days contains no entries in January for me, but I have 101 images in my Library for the month. Most are screenshots, but there are plenty of good photos that Days ignores. The reason is that I didn’t take enough good pictures on those days.
From what I can tell, Days needs at least four photos or videos to generate an entry. (I found one instance with four photos and another with three videos and a photo). The summary shows the “best” photos and videos from that day; clicking All reveals screenshots, near duplicates, and other less interesting shots. What counts as “best” is still pretty interpretive. Photos was happy to call out the closeup photos I took of my ElliptiGO’s hub to explain problems I was experiencing to a repair person, and I couldn’t discern why some photos I took of slides during a presentation at Ithaca College’s Ed Tech Day appeared and others didn’t.
In the end, Days seems useful only for collecting what you take on certain days. I can’t see myself using it much because of having to switch from Summary to All each time (since I don’t trust it to show me what I want to see) and the awareness that it won’t include otherwise great photos that weren’t part of a large enough set that day.
Groups of People & Pets
Photos has had face recognition for people for years, and Apple added recognition of cats and dogs in the 2023 releases of iOS 17 and macOS 14 Sonoma. New in Sequoia is the option to create groups of recognized people and pets. Photos automatically creates a few of these groups, and all but one of mine were sensible. Groups of me and Tonya, me and Tristan, and all three of us are obvious, and I was pleased that it created a group of photos of me and our late friend Oliver (see “Oliver Habicht Dies of Pancreatic Cancer at 53,” 26 September 2020), but the final automatically created group contained just eight photos of me and my seldom-photographed nephew as an infant, 20+ years ago. It was easily deleted by Control-clicking it and choosing the improperly capitalized “Remove this Group.”
You can also create your own groups by clicking Create on the top-right side of the window and selecting the people you want to include. Once you have more than five groups, you have to scroll horizontally to see them all, which is in keeping with Apple’s recent design approach in Photos, though I prefer vertical scrolling.
There is one additional quirk to working with groups. By default, if you have a group of three people, say, all the photos in the group will contain only those three people. However, if you choose View > Other People, Photos expands the group to include pictures of those three people that also include others.
Fuzzy Memories
I find the Memories feature to be completely worthless. When Photos generates these slideshow movies for me, they’re always strange, often including jarringly unrelated photos or sometimes just terrible shots, such as pictures that are out of focus or need to be rotated. In Sequoia, if you use Apple Intelligence, a new option lets you create a Memory movie with a description. Some of my attempts to get this feature to work fail because it matches too few photos; when it does work, the results are unimpressive. Perhaps it works better for others.
You can delete unwanted Memory movies by selecting them and pressing Delete. Until now, I have just ignored the entire feature. However, I was curious what deselecting Photos > Settings > General > Memories > Show Featured Content would do. Amusingly, what it does is crash Photos instantly. (I’ve reported the bug to Apple.) However, after Photos comes back up, the Memories item has disappeared from the sidebar. Hooray! Surprisingly, Featured Photos also disappeared.
Memorable Trips
More successful is Trips, which collects all the photos and videos you take on a particular trip. It’s smart enough to figure out when you leave and return home, so even if you visit multiple locations while you’re away, Trips will realize it’s all one excursion. You can scroll through all your trips on one screen, or if you travel a lot more than I do, you can filter trips by year.
I couldn’t resist sharing the Self Serve Cheese 24/7 photo
On the whole, Trips does a good job of detecting trips and collecting their photos. I do have one trip that seems out of place. Every fall, Tonya and I travel to five cross-country meets around upstate New York, and I often take some photos, sometimes a lot of photos. However, only one of them appears in Trips. My guess is that Trips picked it up because I took photos in three locations that day (at the race, at the post-season banquet a few miles away, and at a nearby Apple Store where we stopped on the way home to see things in person; see “Visiting an Apple Store: The Value of In-Person Impressions,” 11 November 2022).
Within each trip, Photos maintains the split between Summary and All. I remain dubious about the utility of the summary because I always wonder what it’s not showing me. I’d like to see Photos remember when you’ve clicked All rather than always defaulting to Summary. At least you can use the keyboard to switch quickly between Summary (Command-1) and All (Command-2).
Featured Photos
I’m a massive fan of the way the Photo Shuffle feature for Lock Screen wallpaper and the Photos face on the Apple Watch use machine learning to choose photos (see “Bring Yourself Recurring Joy with Apple’s New Lock Screen Photo Shuffle,” 19 November 2022). They make occasional mistakes but do an excellent job overall.
That’s why I find the Featured Photos collection in Photos somewhat mystifying. Apart from picking a few photos I marked as favorites, its selection feels largely random. I barely know some of the people in the photos, and I created other images for article illustrations, so they’re one step up from screenshots. The contents of Featured Photos have some overlap between my iPhone and two Macs, but they’re not identical. Even the number of photos is different on each device. I can see arguments for having Featured Photos be the same on all synced devices or different on all devices, but having it be somewhat similar is inexplicable.
In the end, I can’t figure out Featured Photos. It might be worth visiting more often if its contents changed more completely, as the iPhone Lock Screen and Apple Watch Photos face do. As it stands, every time I look at it, I wonder why it chose the photos it did and why some seem stuck. Maybe it just needs to be cleared so it can reset? If you don’t like Featured Photos, turn off Photos > Settings > General > Memories > Show Featured Content and relaunch Photos after it crashes.
I’d like an option in System Settings > Wallpaper to use the Featured Photos collection as an automatically rotating wallpaper, with some attention to picking only landscape images that would work well on the desktop. As far as I can tell, you can pick a particular photo, an album, photos of a specific person, and all photos, but not the Featured Photos collection.
Utilities & Media Types
The next two sidebar sections in Photos are somewhat related: Utilities and Media Types. Both debuted in Photos for iOS, with Media Types migrating to the Mac in macOS 13 Ventura and Utilities making its first appearance in Sequoia.
Although both are conceptually just smart albums, Utilities bases its collection on content or action. Images appear in Receipts, Handwriting, Illustrations, and Documents based on what’s in the picture, whereas items show up in Hidden, Duplicates, Recently Viewed, Recently Edited, Recently Shared, and Imports based on an action you’ve taken. You can see why I think Recently Saved and Recently Deleted should be here.
In contrast, Media Types limits itself to what are essentially different file types. You might take exception with the inclusion of Selfies, but that’s just a shorthand way of identifying photos taken with the front camera. Animated is for animated GIFs or Live Photos effects, and Spatial Videos appears if you’ve created any 3D videos for the Vision Pro.
Both Utilities and Media Types are highly welcome. Few people will use them regularly, hence the disclosure triangle for hiding their contents, but I can imagine all sorts of reasons to dip into one or more collections. I’m particularly taken with Receipts and Handwriting, which, between them, identify most of the receipts and checks I should delete, having already submitted them to the Finger Lakes Runners Club bookkeeper.
You may see a Recovered item in the Utilities list. This new feature in Photos in Sequoia “surfaces images that are on your device but were not previously visible due to database corruption in a locked album.” If you see this item appear, it’s worth checking what Photos has found, especially if you’ve encountered issues with locked albums in the past.
In macOS 15.4 Sequoia, Photos allows you to rearrange the items in Utilities and Media Types by dragging the items around. That’s great because it lets you put them in the order that makes the most sense to you, likely with your most-used items first. Or, if you don’t regularly use anything in these collections, you could always alphabetize them—does the arrangement below make more sense to you? (Amusingly, when I drag Screen Recordings, it always snaps back to its previous position, although I can drag other items to rearrange it indirectly. I’ve reported the bug to Apple.)
The other new feature in macOS 15.4 is the View > Hide/Show Recently Viewed & Shared command. Much like View > Hide/Show Hidden Photo Album, it shortens the list of items in the Utilities menu. While I generally favor interface customization, I fail to see why Apple feels users should be able to hide Recently Viewed and Recently Shared. Perhaps there’s a privacy angle, given that these collections reveal something about the user’s behavior?
Sorting and Filters
Within any collection or album, you can sort and filter what’s showing. Many of the collections in Photos are locked to a chronological sort (based on capture date or import date), but in a few spots, you can sort by title or drag items around manually. The release notes for macOS 15.4 say there’s an option to sort albums by Date Modified, but I can’t see any indication of that in View > Sort or anywhere else in the interface. Similarly, although Photos in macOS 15.4 supposedly provides “consistent filtering options in all collections, including the ability to sort by oldest or newest first,” I wasn’t able to find any inconsistencies in the previous version.
While we’re on the topic, does anyone understand the View > Arrange options (By Newest First, By Oldest First)? Most of the time, they’re disabled, and when they’re active, choosing one or the other makes no difference in the current view.
Filtering is more interesting. Using the pop-up Filter menu in the upper-right corner of any photo view or the View > Filter By menu, you can filter the view to show only items of certain types. Filters are helpful for limiting a large selection of images to just those you’ve favorited or edited, for instance, or distinguishing between photos, videos, and screenshots. New in macOS 15.4 is the “Not in an Album” filter, which is a godsend for people who want all their photos to end up in an album. A consultant friend told me he has a client who was holding onto an ancient Mac to run iPhoto for this feature alone. That’s commitment.
Finally, there are two commands in the View menu that affect which images appear in nearly any collection you’re viewing. View > Screenshots lets you hide or show screenshots, and View > Shared With You enables you to include or exclude images others have shared with you. Both can be helpful. Since I work with screenshots more than anything else in Photos, I leave Screenshots checked most of the time, but it’s a relief when I deselect Screenshots to focus on just photos and videos. Few people share photos with me, so I always leave Shared With You checked.
Years ago, when we had iPhoto, I knew every nook and cranny of that app due to writing iPhoto for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit. Without the excuse of a book, I haven’t explored Photos to the same extent. I’m simultaneously impressed at the attention that Apple has given it and troubled that I found three bugs to report in the few hours I spent poking at just some of the organizational features. Photos is far from perfect, but it does provide a feature set that’s both broad and subtle.
