So for those of us who do not want to go iCloud, but enjoy using Photos on both Mac and iPhone, what is the best way to go about this? I’m sure what I’ve been doing is not the most efficient way to get the job done, so I’m hoping others’ good advice can help with that.
My main issue is that the only type of album available to both Mac and iPhone [1] are those made on the Mac since they show up in the On My Mac section on iOS Photos whereas any album I create on iOS Photos does not seem to show up anywhere on macOS Photos.
So that forces me to collect pictures and create the album on the Mac. But since almost all my Photos come from the iPhone, that now requires a tedious sync/import cycle: import photos from iPhone to Mac, create album on Mac, sync results back to iPhone. If along the way I forget to delete upon import, I’ll later have duplicates, etc. It’s a pain. Plus, on the iPhone my albums then all show up hidden under On My Mac (and after a whole bunch of categories I couldn’t care less about) instead of up in the Album section (because apparently that’s the iPhone-only album area) where they’d be easier to reach. There’s got to be a better way to do this. iCloud sync is likely one such better way. I’m hoping there are others. If you have good ideas, please do tell.
Does anybody know what the real distinction is between Album and Folder on iOS Photos?The only difference I can tell is that the former has a big thumbnail image while the latter shows just a grid. There’s got to be something more substantial. ↩︎
Albums can only contain photos. Folders only contain albums, smart albums (on a Mac), and other folders. For major trips, I have often created a hierarchy:
Trip folder->Day folder->Place Album->Photos from that place. I usually add an album of photos from the whole trip under the trip folder.
By the way, it’s easy to create a smart album of all photos in a library that are not in any normal album. Just match the condition ‘Album is not Any’. You can then select all photos in that smart album to create a new ‘real’ album.
I use iCloud Photos Library and don’t have any of the issues you have with syncing. I ensure that there is a copy of the full library on my desktop Mac, but everything is accessible on all my devices when I have an Internet connection. However, by using a master folder containing all your archived photos, you may make it easier to keep track of what you are doing when you are syncing.
The new iOS 18 Photos has a category called Pinned Collections that can be configured to show certain albums and it can also be moved to the top so it sits right under Library and shows right when you open the app. I was hoping this would allow me to push my Mac albums all the way to the top. Turns out that would work if you wanted just one specific Mac album. But I wasn’t able to get it to display all Mac albums. When you configure Pinned Collections you choose either certain categories (like Favorites or Screenshots) or a specific album. While you can choose a specific Mac album there, you cannot choose all Mac albums as a category.
I will note that the new iOS 18 Photos has really grown on me. I know people spewed venom left and right about it, but the fact that it has become so customizable means I can remove all that junk I’ve never wanted to see and now I’m left with a pretty minimalist and clean interface giving me direct access to what I really care about. This is something I really love and I wish it found its way to other apps (iOS and Mac). I also love the tap on All to scroll all the way to the bottom of the Library — if only other apps had this too! It would so nicely complement the standard iOS tap the icon area to scroll to the top. Now if only the new Photos didn’t lag or crash quite as much (I’m not used to seeing stock iOS apps crash, but Photos has now done it about 5 times in 2 days) I’d be a huge fan.
FWIW, my entire Photos library is organized into a hierarchy of the form: Year → Event. A big event (like a vacation that involves visits to many attractions) will get a subfolder: Year → Event → Attraction. And each year has a “Misc” album for those one-off pictures that don’t correspond to an actual event. Within each album, the pictures are sorted by timestamp.
I don’t use any iCloud syncing. I offload pictures via USB to my Mac and manually create albums (in the correct folder) or manually drag images to existing albums as appropriate.
I have a few albums that are synchronized back to my phone, so I can show pictures to friends when I’m out and about:
This is very useful. Thank you. Found a whole bunch of duds that way lingering for many years in my Library. Threw out about 1GB worth of junk. Also found a couple pics I thought I had lost.
I would never consider having a mobile device replace my Macs because of the lack of user-defined Smart objects. The way I deal with Mail relies on Smart Mailboxes, and Music relies on Smart Playlists. When photo management was all Mac-based, with stand-alone pocket cameras vastly superior to mobile phones for photography, I used Smart Albums in Aperture to manage my photo library. Smart Albums in Photos are useful, but, unfortunately, the collection of conditions that can be tested is drastically smaller.
You might want to look at Mylio. It offers comprehensive syncing options, including device-to-device sync. I think you still need a Mylio account, but that’s just to coordinate the devices – the photos and their metadata are never uploaded to any servers, they transfer directly between your devices.
I’ve tried it out several times over the years when thinking about how to update my photos workflow, and there’s a lot to like. I’m currently still doing a manual sync over USB between my Mac (master library) and phone. But it is pretty cumbersome so I want to move to some sort of private network syncing. Lack of time has prevented me from making any progress other than occasionally testing out solutions like Mylio (which, aside from Apple’s now-encrypted iCloud Photo Library, is the only ‘private’ sync option I’ve found).
Mylio (which, aside from Apple’s now-encrypted iCloud Photo Library, is the only ‘private’ sync option I’ve found).
You should put Photosync high up on your testing list. It can transfer/sync from pretty much anything directly to anything, no account or cloud needed. Inexpensive one time purchase available. I’ve been using it for at least ten years.
The free download lets you test the workflow completely but is limited to low resolution copies. Pro ($6) gets you full resolution and the most essential features, Premium ($25) gets you more advanced things such as automatic transfers, client side encryption, iOS shortcuts, etc. There are free companion apps for mac and windows; linux just uses sftp and doesn’t need an app.
I primarily have mine (premium) set up to copy anything that hasn’t already been transferred to a mac folder hierarchy by device then year/month. You can have it do albums too, but because a single photo can be in multiple albums it can potentially be kind of messy and you can end up with duplicates, so I keep it simple and import the mac folders to aperture to classify from there. I could have the phone export to aperture (or photos) directly, and that might take care of the album problem, but I don’t want my originals buried in the library. If I want to put things on to iOS, I can transfer a folder of images into an album, either pre-existing or new.
Sadly Photosync does NOT have a companion app to run on MacOS. I use an Android phone and want to sync my phone photos in full resolution to iCloud. It seems, having downloaded and agreed to the seven day trial of an upgrade, I cannot upload to my iCloud account… I want to use iCloud as it has, I believe, a 50Gb storage option for $10 a year. That would be ideal as I use a macBook Pro M1 as my main machine. For the time being I signed up to a free 10Gb Box account which Photosync does sync to. Does anyone know how I might back up my Android photos in full res to iCloud?
I spoke too soon :( I can’t log in to the app. One of the reviews explains you have to log in with an app-specific password… You have to generate this like so: Sign in to apps with your Apple Account using app-specific passwords – Apple Support (UK) These are for apps developed by anyone other than Apple. So I’ve tried with two separate new passwords and still can’t log in. Left feedback on the Google Play Store requesting help from the dev.
I do not trust iCloud with my image files - one bad experience is enough. On the road, I use Dropbox as backup. I don’t like the file management approach used in Photos in iPhone as it is annoying with its limitations and with its ‘auto-organisation’.
Instead I save my iPhone image files to folders on my Mac having downloaded from my iPhone either via Airplay or Dropbox. I name each image yyyymmdd place etc etc to have a nearly unique file name for each image. I use either Photoshop Organiser or Lightroom to handle file management. That way I can allocate the same image to various projects, subjects, themes, etc.
I would very much like being able to pre-set image file names on the iPhone so the images can tend towards self-grouping and for easier searching.
I also shoot with DSLRs and so there’s reason to use this image filing approach of mine.
