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se99jmk

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 11, 2012
105
16
I'll start off by saying that I LOVE Photos - the automatic and seamless (by and large) sync between mobile devices, plus the clean and simple interface is fantastic.

I'm now trying to organise my photos, and wondering about the best way to manage events in particular..

At a root level, I have (for quick access):
- Events (renamed from iPhoto Events)
- A smart album
- An album with sub folders for my wedding day
- An album for my dog
- Plus of course the enforced folders (like panoramas)

=============

Within the Events folder, are albums for each event (with a couple of folders for grouping some events, like sets of photos from multiple people for the same event)

As far as I can tell, it's not possible to automatically order the albums by date of the photos they contain (like iPhoto used to), so I am labelling them "MM-YY Event Name", and manually ordering them as needed.

This leads to the annoying situation that if I want to add a new album (from the Moments area), the "Add New Album" button is at the bottom of the entire list - and there's no way to quickly scroll to the bottom. With 297 albums that's a lot of scrolling to add a new one!!

So, I'm actually discouraged to add new events.. (I appreciate you can kind of look at them in Moments, but I like to make sure that holidays - which span over multiple days - are all in one album, and by using albums you can also search based on the album name)

What do you think - any tips?

=============

Another area of confusion is Family Sharing - I don't have Family Sharing turned on, but do have a Shared Album with my wife.

(With iPhoto, we just used a shared database between logins on the same laptop, but probably best to use iCloud Photos the way it's intended, with separate Apple IDs)

Annoyingly though to share and combine photos of an event, the process seems to be:
- She goes to Moments, selects photos, and adds to shared album
- I then have to select those exact same photos, and save them to my iCloud Photos
- Then somehow find those newly saved photos and select them again, and add them to an album (along with my own)

Seems like a very cumbersome process!! The same set of photos have to be selected three times - once by my wife, twice by me - any tips?

=============

Minor issues:
- Smart album finds results on MBP, but not MBA, and shame there are no smart albums on mobile
- One folder-within-a-folder shows correctly on both laptops and iPad, but empty on iPhone..
- Hidden folder shows on iPhone, but not on any other device (despite being imported from iPhoto on the desktop)
- How can I turn off the automatic folders? I don't care about panoramas specifically for example, only within the context of going away on holiday
 

se99jmk

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 11, 2012
105
16
Turns out, by using a prefix, and sorting automatically by Title, they Events are effectively automatically sorted!!

EDIT - Prefix needs to be YYYY-MM so it sorts by date correctly

This sorting method is only done on the Desktop though, not mobile, so presumably if I created the album on mobile, it would be in a random order until I opened Photos on the desktop, at which point it should enforce the sort method...

Even so, this doesn't help with:
a) "Add Event" is at the bottom of the list so takes a long time to scroll to
b) How to share photos easily and simply (so we have one "Event" which is a mix of mine and my wife's photos)

Regarding b), presumably the response would be just to leave it as a shared album. however...
- When looking through my "Events", some are in my events folder, some are in the shared folder.. two places to look
- We currently use a "Family Sharing" album for the two of us, which is not broken up by event. The alternative would be to end up with a high number of "Shared Event" folders, and I would need to invite my wife (and have her accept) every time
 
Last edited:

GlenK

macrumors 65816
Aug 1, 2013
1,446
888
St. Augustine, FL
I'm working on the same thing and like some of your ideas. I was waiting on Photos and haven't really messed with iPhotos since I found out it was going away.

I just started using the iCloud Photo Library and love that too. It seems to have been made for Photos.

One issue I just found is I started Photo Sharing with my wife and we set up a folder on our iPhones and iPads that both work. But now the shared folder does not show up in Photos on my Mac. Did I miss a setting??

I have Sharing turned on every where I can find it but when I go to sharing it acts like I'm just starting sharing. I still get the start sharing screen.
 

se99jmk

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 11, 2012
105
16
"iCloud Photo Sharing" within the Preferences area is the only place I can see to enable it..
 
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