Photos not in folder / no location (former smart folders)

Sadly, there are no Smart Folders in iOS or iPadOS. I gotta tell you, the new Apple Silicon Macs are pretty sweet-- think about it!

You can let Apple know what you need here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

Regarding Silicon Macs consider the following when the budget permits: a 10 Core Mac Mini M4 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD ($999 + tax) with a 27" LG 4k monitor ($250 + tax from Amazon.com)  is $1249 + tax which is $560 less than a similarly configured new 24" iMac ($1799 + tax)  re 07/2025. Keep your keyboard and mouse from your current Mac for use with the Mini. 

I got the above Mini with a 32" LG 4K monitor w/speakers for only $60 more than the 27" (didn't know the Mini had a speaker). It runs rings around my pervious 17" 2017 iMac with the top CPU, and i9.

The Mini M4 can open an 183 GB (54,000 photos and 900 video) in 2 seconds.

Just some food for thought.

If you are willing to use iCloud Photos you could still use Photos for Mac to search with smart albums.

Then create standard albums from the items in the smart albums and let iCloud Photos sync the standard albums to the iPhone and iPad.

Now you can do the organizing on your iPad.

I am using my iPad Pro mainly for browsing my Photos and as a portable TV, but I still manage the photos library primarily on my MacBook Air. This will not change, as long as the titles, keywords, and smart albums are missing in Photos on the iPad. The titles below the thumbnails, keywords and smart albums are my most important tools when organizing my photos.

You may want to send feedback with a feature request to Apple, that we need the ability to create smart albums on the iPad. Feedback - Photos - Apple Perhaps Apple will listen some day. I am very optimistic, now that iPad apps can run on a Mac.

As léonie and Old Toad (and I) have said, the Mac is the only way to do serious curating and organizing of pictures in Photos. Almost none of what I do with pictures in Photos is easy on an iPad, except for beautifully displaying the images, and maybe a little bit of editing. léonie mentions titles, keywords, and smart albums, but in addition, any operation with albums and folders is way, way easier on the Mac-- and all that organization will be transferred and displayed beautifully on the iPad and iPhone.

I couldn't select and rate pictures without Smart Albums, keywords, and Filters that are available on the Mac. And Mac Photos supports pretty good slideshows, versatile exporting, and apps and scripts that allow batch operations. Macs allow for multiple Photos Libraries for even higher level organization. Macs also allow for easy backups of our precious pictures.

By the way, since a Mac supports multiple Photos Libraries, you might be able with your older Mac to use smaller Libraries that might be faster. And you can keep Libraries on external drives to allow for extra room inside the Mac.

Just sayin'

BTW., on my first iPad (with iOs 5 to iOS7) I could use smart albums and keywords on my iPad, I could enter titles for the photos, apply local adjustments by brushing them in with my fingertips or the pencil, it has been exactly like I wanted a photos.app on an iPad to be, and everyone seeing me working with my pictures this way was jealous and wanted an iPad as well. All this is yesterday's snow and no longer possible after Apple made iPhoto iOS incompatible with the upgrade to iOS8. We were now restricted to Photos iOS. And my iPad has been turned into an expensive book reader. We could no longer use it for the on-site documentation of our field experiments, because we could no longer tag the photos with keywords and comments right after taking them.

Multiple libraries is a great idea!