Folders vs albums how to organize

ljgtennis wrote: Explain organizing photos using folders vs albums on a mac

[ Most people would add, "Please."]

There are at least 5 important ways to organize pictures:

(1) Put your pictures in Albums. 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. You don't get fewer pictures in your Library because you remove one from an album; you just get fewer names in the album list.

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.

So, when you put pictures "into" albums, don't think of just one album-- think of al the albums you might want to put it in. You cannot have too many albums! See next:

(2) If you have lots of Albums, put your albums into Folders. Folders can have albums, and they can have folders that have albums in them. (But folders don't hold individual pictures.) Since I've been doing this for awhile, I have folders for events inside folders for years inside folders for decades. I also have folders for "Best Picture" albums and folders for "Wife's family" albums, and so on.

Since you can put albums into folders, it never hurts to have extra albums. If you have a bunch of albums you don't look at very often, then you can put them all in a "Not Used Much" folder, and all of those only take up a single space in Albums section of the iPhone or Mac. If you have 1000 albums, they'll take multiple screens to display. But if they're in folders, then they can all fin on one or two screens.

(3) Use Smart Albums in Macs. Add Captions and Keywords and Titles to pictures, and then you can use those in Smart Albums to make dynamic collections. If you have a bunch of albums of horse shows, then you can have HorseShow as a keyword, and you can use a Smart Album to get horse shows together. And it will automatically update.

(4) With Keywords you can use Filters. You can go to the Library and restrict it to HorseShows and Favorites. It's not as versatile as Smart Albums, but it's really quick.

(5) Use Favorites-- they work in Smart Albums. Here's some stuff about using keywords and smart albums to select favorites: Choosing Favorites using Keywords in Mac … - Apple Community

It's very simple: Only albums contain photographs. Folder cannot contain photographs but the can contain albums and other folders.

So make albums of, say, your summer holiday photos from each of the last 10 years.

Create a folder and call it Summer Holidays. Drag the albums to the folder.