Photos Mac/iPhone without iCloud — how to best manage your pics

TidBITS Talk
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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.

  1. 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. ↩︎

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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.

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I almost had found a solution to this.

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. :wink:

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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:

  • Everything from the last 6 months
  • Everything with my wife
  • Everything with my daughter
  • Everything with my cats
  • Everything with me

This works pretty well for me.

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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. :slightly_smiling_face:

In fact, I wish iOS Photos had something similar.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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?

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Eureka! I found an app recommended by AndroidAuthority. It’s called Sync for iCloud - just installed and looks promising. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details

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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.

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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.

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I need to find easier way to organize photos on my MacBook Air that I get from my iPhone. I also do not want to use iCloud and do not like the limitations to organizing my photos in “Apple Photos”. I would prefer to create my own folders on my Mac to save and organize photos, sometimes having a duplicate in different folders.

Michel you said you use “Photoshop Organizer” or “Lightroom” to handle photo file organization. How do I buy “Photoshop Organizer”. is that the same thing as “Adobe Photoshop Elements”? Could you provide the website link to purchase the “Photoshop Organizer” you use?

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Since you do not want to use iCloud, which would allow sharing a Mac folder structure for your photos with your iPhone or iPad, have you considered Dropbox?

I used to use it for that purpose before I migrated to iCloud file sharing. Basically, you create the folder structure for your photos in a Dropbox folder (or you symlink to it from the Dropbox folder) and than the Dropbox app on your iOS device lets you access that same folder structure with your photos. Obviously, this is more suited to just organizing and viewing, not necessarily editing, but depending on your needs that might be good enough.

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I’ve only recently moved to a MacBook Air from Microsoft based Laptops. I’m not interested in syncing my iPhone photos with my MacBook.

I just want to take photos off my iPhone and put them on my MacBook and have a simple user-friendly software to organize and store all my photos (backing up my important MacBook files and all photos to an external drive - No Cloud backups for me).

What is a simple, user-friendly software to have on my Macbook (no iCloud associated with it) to store and organize all my photos?

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Image Capture will let you get pics off your iPhone and onto your Mac. What you then use to edit and organize would then be entirely up to your preference. I like the idea of regular Finder folders for organization. And for editing, I’ve always been a big fan of GraphicConverter. IMHO very well invested money.

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You can do what I do - I use the Photos to import my pictures via a USB cable. No iCloud configured for Photos on the phone or the Mac.

Or, if you don’t want to use Photos as your organizer, you can, as @simon wrote, use Image Capture to download photos from the phone. From there, you can organize them using whatever app you prefer.

In either case, when you connect the phone to the Mac with a USB cable, you will see it appear in Photos and in Image Capture as a camera device. From there, it is easy to select the device and import pictures from it.

And if you have other kinds of cameras (e.g. DSLRs or Android phones), the process is the same. If the device (camera or phone) can be connected via USB and makes itself accessible as a storage device, it will import directly. Or you can remove the storage (typically an SD or micro-SD card these days) and connect it to the computer via an appropriate USB adapter (or plug it in directly if your Mac is a model with a built-in SD card slot).

I’ve been using Apple’s software (Photos today, and iPhoto before that) for a long time. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. And you don’t have to configure all the iCloud features if you don’t want to use them.

I know that professionals like Adobe Lightroom, but it is only available via a subscription, and you may not want to pay for it. Adobe Photoshop Elements (no subscription, but you need to buy a new license and upgrade every 3 year, which sucks) includes a photo organization app. I’ve never used it, so I can’t tell you if it’s any good.

One important thing to note: Modern iPhones, in their default configuration, take pictures in HEIC format, not JPEG. This isn’t a problem if you’re using Apple software, but some third-party picture organizer systems may not support it.

I don’t know if Image Capture can be configured to convert HEIC to JPEG as a part of the import process. If it doesn’t, and your software doesn’t support HEIC, and you don’t want to install software to do the conversion, you can configure you phone to take pictures in JPEG format. See Here's how to change HEIC images to JPEG on iPhone | Tom's Guide

This isn’t a bad approach, actually. You can configure Finder folders to display thumbnails of each image when in icon view. And the MacOS-bundled Preview app has no problem viewing and printing HEIC images. And you can make edits with whatever software you like.

Popular image-editing apps include (in no particular order):

  • Adobe Photoshop. Only available via Creative Cloud subscription. $23/mo for PS only or $70/mo for a CC Pro subscription.
  • Adobe Photoshop Elements. Should be good enough for non-professional use. $100. No subscription, but the license expires every 3 years.
  • Graphic Converter. $40
  • Pixelmator Pro. A lot of people like this as an alternative to Photoshop. Owned by Apple since February. $50.
  • Photomator. Designed for photo manipulation more than generic image editing. Also owned by Apple since February. Free installation, but with an in-app-purchase subscription ($120 lifetime, $80 lifetime special-offer, $30 yearly, $8 monthly). I have no idea what, if anything, you can do with it without a subscription.
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@Shamino
:+1:
(I agree with the post)

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Another photo editing application, sold via license not subscription, is Affinity Photo. I switched from Photoshop Elements to Affinity Photo a few years ago. I have no complaints.

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While HEIF/HEIV (High Efficiency) is the default camera setting, you can change it to JPEG/H.264 (Most Compatible) via the Format tab of Camera Settings. The note under the setting explains the features that are not available if you select the latter option.

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