Removing photos from iPhone library after adding to albums

Photos, (like iPhoto, Aperture, Music, iTunes) is a database. This means it can be very flexible and powerful, if sometimes a little confusing. The library is the core of the app. Every image is in the library. Albums are virtual, and are just subsets of the library. In fact, Albums are not places, they are lists - instructions to the app to 'display this group of images together'. So images do not get "moved" to Albums, they get added to that particular list. This means that an image can be in more than one album but use no extra disk space. Similarly in the Music app, all the tracks are in the Library and can be added to any number of playlists.

In a Mac:

If you're trying to organise your Library and want to find images not in albums, then a simple Smart Album

File -> New Smart Album

Album -> Is Not -> Any

will find these images. As you add them to albums they will disappear from the Smart Album.

On iPad or iPhone, which do not currently support Smart Albums, since iOS 18.3 identify images not in any album using a filter:

On the main screen tap on the up/arrow and select filter: Not in An Album. Further, you can check the bottom of the Info panel of a photograph for any albums that the image is currently added to.

MarkLiMel wrote:

doesn’t make any sense. … is there a way i can remove the photos permanently to the albums so I won’t see them in my library?

Well, no. If a picture disappeared from the Library view, then you'd have a hard time finding it again to put it in an additional album. Photos works in a way that makes it possible for pictures to be "in" many albums. It makes lots of sense.

In Photos, pictures aren't exactly "in" an album. When you "put a picture into an album," its name is added to a list of pictures from the Library that display together when the album is clicked, kind of like a music playlist, but for pictures. So two albums can both have the same picture name in their lists (like two playlists with the same song,)  and that picture will show up when you click either album, but there's only one picture file-- it's just on multiple lists. And when you remove a picture from an album, its name remains in the lists of other albums, and the file still remains in your Library. This allows you to organize your pictures with albums without having to exclude a picture just because it's already somewhere else.

So albums give a specific view of your pictures. The picture of "Aunt Ethel at the Grand Canyon" can be in the "Aunt Ethel" album with other pictures of Aunt Ethel, and it can also be in the "Grand Canyon"  album with pictures of other people at the Grand Canyon. And it can also be in a the "September 2015" album with other things that happened then. Each album is pointing to a single file stored in the Photos Library, so having pictures in multiple albums takes up no more storage space. As you can imagine, this is very powerful in organizing pictures.

If you want to see which pictures haven't yet been assigned an album, then you can use Filters. LIke this:

In what way does this not do what you say you want?

Are you using iCloud Photos? On iOS17 or later you can split your iCloud Photos Library into two compartment, a personal library and a shared library. we can easily move photos between the the two libraries, but they will remain in the albums we create. There is a toggle switch to see either the shared Library, the personal Library, or both joined together.

So you could move all photos you added to an album to the Shared library. When you switch the view the Personal Library you will no longer see the photos you moved to the shared library. Toggle freely between the shared Library with your photos in albums and the personal library with the unorganized mess.

This will work on the iPhone, iPad, Mac. And is a nice use of the Shared iCloud Photos Library, if we do not need it to share our photos.

See: Using the Shared iCloud Photos Library to have two separate libraries on all devices - Apple Community

Because the albums are "virtual". There is only one copy of each phone. They all live in the library.

This post was specifically about iPhones, but for Macs, there is also a Not in Album filter.

I still have a Smart Album for this, but it has become superfluous.

Also on the Mac, "Not in Album" is menu choice in View>Filter by>Not in Album

Hi RIchard

Thanks for that, I hadn't noticed it.