I can't access photo albums that I have created when i am trying to upload to my website

I am adding my voice to this issue. For years, I have been able to access my custom photo albums on my Macbook when attaching photos to emails, uploading to social media, or uploading to other applications. The most recent version of Ventura removed that option. Now I can only select photos from my LIBRARY... which is vast and contains far too many photos to find what I'm looking for. Why would Apple take away such basic functionality? Please bring it back!

I've assigned names to some of my photos. But it's a task I've never been able to keep up with. With thousands of photos in my library, it would be overwhelming to go back and assign names/keywords. I would also have difficulty recalling what names/keywords I assigned. Organizing my album is really the only practical way for me to quickly access groups of photos.

That capability has been left out of Ventura and Photos V 8.0. Tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via Feedback - Photos - Apple

and Feedback - macOS - Apple.  

In the meantime a easy workaround is to assign an unique keyword to the photos to be uploaded and then search for that keyword in the browser's Media section where the albums don't show.

Add a unique keyword to those you want to upload and search for the keyword. After uploading remove the keyword from the photos till the next batch.

Also, in the spirit of the squeaky wheel gets the grease, tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via Feedback - Photos - Apple

Insulator_Collector wrote:

Old Toad, that's an interesting solution... apply one identical keyword to all photos in an album, then search that keyword to reveal all photos in that album. Thanks for the idea! 👍

You're welcome. Also tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via Feedback - Photos - Apple - the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" premise.

It might be easier to simply export the photos from your album to a folder on your Desktop, then select them from this folder, when uploading.

In Mail or the iWork apps I am already seeing the folders and albums, when I try to access the Photos Library, but Safari and other browsers have not yet been updated to be able to show the folders and and albums. Currently it is nearly impossible to find the photos we want to upload, when our library is quite large.

It looks like Apple does not expect us to try to manage large photo libraries with the Photos.app. Photos has been designed to work seamlessly across all devices, with the same look and feel on the iPhone as on the iPad or Mac. The storage on the smallest device, probably our iPhone or iPod touch, is the bottleneck for the expected size of the library. i have asked in several Apple Stores at the genie for Apple's recommendation for the size of library, and got the same reply everywhere - keep the size of the library below 20 000 photos at most. Not just because of the storage required, but the processing time, when the library is scanned for object categories, faces, scene categories.

Another reason for the the missing list of albums seems to be the size of the display. Because the smaller devices are having only tiny displays, there is not much screen estate to provide long lists of albums or even menu items. Apple seems currently to reduce the need for detailed graphical user interfaces by making Photos smarter with artificial intelligence tools - we can ask Siri to find and open our albums for us or use the search field. The search is much smarter in Ventura than before (but sadly does not open the album we are looking for, when using the search in Safari).

When you send feedback to Apple, you may want to point out the size of your library, the number of albums and folders, and the need to access the user generated albums from other apps, i.e a web browser, when uploading photos. Siri may be smart and know a lot about sharing photos with friend and family, but really does not understand any of the projects I am working on and the purpose of most of the albums and folders I created.

Does Apple actually look at these requests? I don't expect a personal reply but I've been sending this request to Apple almost every day. I don't know why the size of the photo library matters. We had this function before without Apple asking or needing to know the size of the library. It's just a huge problem when someone needs to go through thousands of photos.

I called AppleCare and complained mightily about this issue. My call was escalated to an Apple "Photos" app specialist, who claimed they never heard of this issue! I find that hard to believe.

Anyway, I found a work-around. For me, this issue mostly manifests when I want to attach photos to Outlook emails, or upload photos on Facebook...

I simply open the photos app directly on my Macbook, find the desired album/photo, and copy it (Command-C). Next, I go to where I want to attach or upload the photo and paste it directly into the field (Command-V). It works great for me.

In some respects, this is easier than using the old functionality that Apple took away. In the old way, my albums displayed in a tiny little "tree" that was cumbersome to use. Copy/paste is my solution.

Tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via Feedback - Photos - Apple

Why can't Apple fix this? I have over 30K photos and it's impossible to go through all of them to find the one I want. Come on Apple, fix this.

If you have them all in an album then open the album, select "all" (⌘+A) and add the keyword to the entire batch at one time. I use the Keyword pane (⌘+K) to do it.

Old Toad, that's an interesting solution... apply one identical keyword to all photos in an album, then search that keyword to reveal all photos in that album. Thanks for the idea! 👍

I'd have to go back and tag 10,000 of photos.. Ain't going to happen. I have many albums and not being able to pull from them is a major issue.