If you organize your photo library with the Photos app, whether with iCloud or not, you know that you can get carried away with the times when your image collection is organized automatically or on the contrary you can create your own albums for everything categorize your way.
What we often forget is that there is a third option: smart albums. And thanks to them we can add a new layer of organization with which to consult our collection much more easily. Let’s see some examples of what these albums can be capable of.
How to Create a Smart Album
Unfortunately, we can’t create a smart album on iOS or iPadOS: you have to use macOS. So if you have a Mac, open Photos on it and go to the menu File > New Smart Album:
A window will appear from which you can choose all the filters you want for the album, using the metadata of the photograph itself as variables, such as the date of capture or the type of photograph:
Some Useful Smart Album Ideas
If you think the photos weren’t synced to iCloud correctly, you can mount this album so you can immediately see what items in your photo library are waiting to be uploaded to the cloud.
Are you one of those people who accidentally take burst photos and think they are taking up a lot of storage space? With this smart album, you will be able to locate all the bursts in the photo library and clean it up, leaving you with just one photo.
Do you edit photos in uncompressed formats? If you create this smart album, you will be able to see all photos in these formats, removing all JPGs and videos in MOV or MP4 format.
If you are someone who uses iPhone but also takes photos with digital camera, you can filter all photos taken by this camera with this smart album. Just include the camera name and model appropriately in the “camera model” filter.
This album with two filters allows us to see only photos in which two people are dating. Photos in which only one of these two people appears are discarded, because if you are careful, I ask that you only show me images that meet all the filters.
Finally, a trick that allows us to create smart albums taking into account the location of the photograph. There is no specific filter to do this, but you can combine those in the capture to be able to load the locations with the sites you want.
The best is that you can combine these ideas as you see fit, creating smart albums that adapt to what you need to see. A quick example: “Pictures taken with the Canon EOS 5D and in Berlin with my wife and daughter together.” It’s just a matter of collecting all the filters involved that you’ve seen.
Picture | Soragrit Wongsa
