What is the difference between iphoto library and album

In these snap-happy times, you need all the help you can get to organize your photos on your Mac. Let's see what else you can do with the Photos app to keep your photo and video collection sparkling and up to date.

Here's how to organize photos on Mac using Photos for macOS. Photo collections can get out of control in a flash no pun intended. But you can keep them sorted in Apple Photos by setting up folders. While albums and folders may sound interchangeable, there's actually a big difference between them in Photos. Albums allow you to organize your photos and videos, while folders allow you to organize your albums. Folders can have folders within them and can have nested albums too. But albums cannot have child elements.

The folder structure comes in handy for managing collections of collections around a certain theme. Let's say you have a separate album for every trip you've ever been on with your family.

Then it makes sense to bring all those albums under a single umbrella, which can be your Family Vacations folder. If you're trying to manage photos on your Mac, then it's convenient if you can isolate photos of specific friends or family members. The Photos app knows this and will try to make it easy for you by allowing you to tag people in photos.

The app automatically scans faces that show up in your photos and collects them in the People section of the sidebar. Double-clicking on a face displays photos in which that face appears, across all albums. You can match names to faces by clicking on the Name option that appears when you hover over a face. Once you've tagged people this way, you can search for their photos by typing their name into the search box.

We'll add a word of warning here: while it's great that you can tag people in photos, you must consider the impact of facial recognition on your privacy. Organizing photos on your Mac by location is a great way to keep holiday snaps together. All photos that have a location assigned to them show up on an interactive map in the Places section of the sidebar.

Click on the thumbnail that appears for a particular location and you get a grid view of all the photos assigned to it. Not all photos pick up the location information automatically.

For some, you'll have to add it yourself. To do so, start by opening a photo and clicking on the Info icon, which you'll find in the primary toolbar at the top. You should now see the photo's Info section in a popup window.

Click on the Assign a Location placeholder at the bottom of this window. Photos can be added or deleted from an album with no impact on the original image. Make a habit of cleaning up events each time you import new images from your camera or iPhone. You create an album, then add and organize the content any way you like.

I hope this helps. Monique Archbold on June 25, at am. Monique Reply. John Carroll on June 25, at am. Hi Monique Events are created automatically by iPhoto when photos are imported. Albums are like playlists, you can delete them and it has no impact on the original image. My bet is that if you go carefully through the events you will find the original photos. Hope this helps. John Reply. John Carroll on December 2, at am. Ellen on July 4, at am. John Carroll on July 4, at pm. Hi Ellen — Do you have a Time Machine backup?

June on November 16, at am. John Carroll on November 20, at am. All the best — John Reply. Catherine on August 8, at pm. How do I copy each Album onto an external hard disk? Thanks Catherine Reply. John Carroll on August 8, at pm. Catherine on August 9, at am. John Carroll on August 9, at am.

Thanks for the help!!! John Carroll on May 25, at pm. Either you keep everything on your Mac, or sync up everything in your Photos library with your iCloud Photo Library.

That means no selecting certain photos of events to sync up. Photos can be used without iCloud Photo Library, and thus your iCloud storage.

You can keep both photos and videos in the Photos app, just like you could with iPhoto and Aperture. If you do want to flip on iCloud Photo Library, Photos provides an estimation of how much storage it will take. If that goes over the free amount you have from Apple, you can subscribe to one of its various storage tiers, just like you can from iOS devices. Both pieces of software will live on, for now, though are no longer being developed by Apple. Photos is the new iPhoto, basically, so your library is transferred over.

Aperture users, however, can continue to use Aperture if they want to make more advanced edits. Apple will let you move your iPhoto or Aperture library into Photos and preserve your edits. However, because Apple changed some of its organizational tools, some things do get lost or changed in translation from an iPhoto or Aperture library. Star ratings get turned into hearts or favorites , and projects are turned into albums. Other metadata is retained but will only show up in search.

You need to search for things like color labels and flags. Apple has built it into OS X Once you've updated through the Mac App Store , the app will be automatically installed.

On the Mac? Of course. The same thing goes with your iPhone or iPad. Pretty much every company now, including Amazon , Box , Dropbox , Google , Flickr , and Microsoft have apps that will perfectly and seamlessly sync your camera roll to their servers. Update April 8th, PM: This post was originally published February 5th, and has been updated to reflect that the Photos app has been released as part of OS X Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.