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April 9, 2015

How to use smart albums in Photos for OS X

by John_A

Need to find a group of pictures quickly? Hook yourself up with Photos for OS X’s smart albums.

Smart albums have long been a great way to quickly organize your images without the hassle of having to manually add each individual photo. Photos for OS X, like iPhoto before it, has an easy and quick way to build a Smart Album — read on for a quick tutorial!

How to create a smart album in Photos for OS X

Smart albums are relatively simple to create: Visit the Albums tab, then click and hold the plus (+) button in the toolbar and select Smart Album.

A small window will drop down from the main Photos screen and ask you to first name the Smart Album, then add conditions. Like other workflow-type actions, Smart Albums use a series of if statements to automatically select a certain subset of your images. For instance, if you wanted to see all your edited photographs, you could make a condition that said “Photo [is] [edited]”.

You can also stack conditions by pressing the plus button: Here, I’ve created an album that will only show me edited photos that I took with my iPhone.

You can build a wide variety of conditions into your smart albums, including photos contained in a specific album, keywords, camera model information, aperture setting, Faces, and more.

Once you’re happy with your album, press OK to create it in the Albums section.

How to edit a smart album in Photos for OS X

Not happy with what your smart album returned? You can tweak the conditions by clicking on the gear icon next to the Smart Album’s title.

From here, you’ll be able to edit conditions using your original conditions screen.

Smart albums and iCloud Photo Library

Smart albums are a wonderful way to organize your images in Photos for OS X; unfortunately, they won’t currently sync with iCloud Photo Library, so you won’t see them appear on your other Macs or iOS devices.

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