How to organize my 5000 photos like you did on a PC?

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Hello forum! I am a kinda-new mac user, been going for like 6 years or so but just never learned the ins and outs of it.... Never going back though.

I did some googling and some attempting but I am a tad bit too old for this fiddling around, this grumpy old ******* just wants to be told what to do and then do it. I know I should figure it out by myself but you know, teach an old dog how to sit and all that. Years ago I spent a full day arranging all my 4000 photos and now here we are again and now it is 5000. What I would like to do is just scroll up, delete some as you go along, create some file folders, have some open on the side and just drag-and-drop pics or bunches of pics into them or simply mark a bunch and right-click, select "move 43 photos to Melbourne Mayhem folder".

I have a macbook, same I used for years and in the photos app I create albums, I move some photos to albums, so far so good. But these albums don't seem like folders in the ol' PC way of thinking as the photos end up there as well as remaining in the photos feed or whatever you should call it. I just want to MOVE them from photos (think of it as a main folder) to a subfolder just like you move files around. I don't want the photos app to have 5000 pics to go through, I want them organized into folders, gone from the parent directory once you move them so that I can then clear through the sub-folders one by one. How to make this work? I don't know, that's why I come here to you knowledgeable and helpful people.

I do admit I have searched google but I have not searched this forum, yet. I throw this out hoping for immediate spot-on helpful replies. This is wrong, and I ask for your forgiveness. This old guy has done his share of fiddling around with computers, starting with the Commodore 128D and has now grown impatient, crying mama as soon as something needs to be investigated. I simply want to organize my photos to make it easier to overview and save space. I will gladly download apps and use them, just consider that I was most computer-comfortable in 2006, on a PC.


Thanks in advance, and apologies to those who can't be bothered with impatient *******s.
 

chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

Tell us which Mac you have (model and year) and what version of macOS it's using. That will help us to answer your questions.

Also, with that many photos on your computer, we hope you are making regular backups. Losing irreplaceable photos can be a major catastrophe.
 
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MBAmtloin

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I dont fully understand what you need to for organizing your photos and if you are Mac or windows user which is kind of the same format, just different ways.

what i did to export 13 years of photos was use the file system in finder in both mac (since 2004) and Windows staring this year,
if you have finder: photos that store your photos that is good, these show files that can be edited, copied, deleted and exported. usually these are jpgs or raw picture formats.
if all your photos are in the "Photos" app, you can export those by file name, which can be addd by right clicking on the picture.
there is no easy way to manage 4K worth of photos, but showing these in a thumbnail or date can help make this task easier.
hope this helps.
 
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Welcome to the forum. As you have discovered, this is a very PG forum, so keeping the language cleaner will avoid all those asterisks.

On Photos, it is an app, not a filing system. You can create Albums, which can be handled like folders, to organize the images, but the option on the menu of "Photos" under Library in the sidebar will always show ALL of them. That is what it is for. If you remove an image from "Photos" it will disappear from everywhere else.

I'm not a Photos guru, but what you want to do may well be handled by Albums. You can create a new Album, let's say you name it "Melbourne Mayhem." Now you can drag individual or groups of images from the "Photos" page to the album on the sidebar to the left, drop them there and they will appear in "Melbourne Mayhem" until you remove them either from Photos or from the Album. You can have an image in more than one Album, so if one of the "Melbourne Mayhem" images also works for another album, one named "Melbourne friends" for example, you can drop it from Photos into that album as well.

Photos is actually a database. Every image is in the database in the general folder "Photos." You can then create new collections of those objects by opening Albums and tying the images to the Albums. Note that in doing that you are NOT creating a new copy of the image file just updating a database record to say that THIS IMAGE is now in both PHOTOS and MELBOURNE MAYHEM albums. One image, two references. Photos the application can and will suggest other organizations of the images, including what it calls "Memories" or images that seem to be associated together for some reason. I have Memories that are organized by locations, dates, people, events, objects in the images, etc. One memory is called "Together over the years" where Photos assembled all the images of my wife and me through all the years of the various pictures, no matter where or when it was taken. And once you get all of the images organized into Albums the way you want, you can just ignore the "Photos" collection in the Library on the sidebar until you import some new images and they appear there for you to sort. Shift your thinking from file/folder to repository/album and just let Photos collect in the repository to be entered into an album.

One other benefit of the way Photos works is that the original image is always in the database. If you do an edit, let's say to crop an image, then save it, what gets saved is the original, plus the edits. Edit again and the database has the original, the first edit and then the second edit. If you decide the edits are all wrong, you can go back to the original. And you don't have THREE copies of the image file, just one, with a smaller item for just the edits. The overall database doesn't grow by replicating images with edits, it just has the original image and what you did to it as you edited. When you open the image, the original is retrieved and the edits applied to show you what you expect. Magic!

So let me suggest you put away that ol' PC way of thinking and embrace how Photos works. It really does work pretty well if you use it the way it was designed.

EDIT: By the way, I currently have 10,207 images in Photos, so it is certainly capable of handing that.
 
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IWT


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@colorblend

A warm welcome to Mac-Forums.

First off, your library is really not that large at 5000 photos:)

At a slight risk of repeating what Jake et al have already said:

1. Photos app is a Database - a picture library

2. Albums contain aliases (shortcuts in PC language) to pictures in the main library. So, no copies, no duplications, no extra storage space used. Pictures in an Album can be deleted without harm - BUT deleting a picture from the main Photos library, removes it from the database - initially into the "Recently Deleted" Bin - just in case you made a mistake!

3. Folders may contain Albums, but you cannot put pictures into a folder - only an Album.

4. You can add a name or other info to an individual picture, or group of pictures by selecting it or them - then Command plus "I" (as in information) and type in whatever details you wish.

5. You can tag pictures, giving them a Key Word. To do this = Command plus K. Use the suggested Key words, or create your own.

6. All of the above makes searching for a particular picture so much easier.

7. Photos app does a lot of the work for you. By default, it arranges your pictures in date order, location (called places), allows you to select favourites, identifies faces to which you can allocate a name. It creates Albums containing Live Photos, Videos, Selfies, Portraits, Bursts, Slo-mo - and more. It does this for you. No effort from you.

And I haven't touched on the photo-editing suite!!:)

So, stick with it - and don't worry - Enjoy!

Ian
 
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Not much to add except Photos will allow you to search with key words - cat, shadows, trees, food, avocado, etc and bring them all up from where you can copy and add/drag to a named folder. The way Windows evolved its photos app was one of the key reasons I swapped to Mac in 2011.

The storage hierarchy is My Albums > Folder > Album which can be condensed or left fully open in the side bar.

I have around 46,000 images in my Photos library so you have some way to go!
 
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MBAmtloin

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I have around 46,000 images in my Photos library so you have some way to go!

23,000 images of shoes?

I'm deleting 100 from Flickr, and 28GB from a flash drive, we take too many photos nowadays
also, after looking a bunch now, I discovered that My kodak ez-cam 1998 takes crisper fotos than the Nikon D500.
 
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Cheek!!:D Probably cats...8,000 over 16 years but that's only half the amount from travel. My photos are my memories and I love having them all in one place. I do make an annual calendar for family and friends and normally a hardback book after a holiday.

Most of the time I can't discern a quality difference between images taken on my iphone (various models), first digi camera (Kodak Z740) or my current Lumix FZ300.

Sunset on a canal boat trip in Yorkshire.

Version 2 (1).jpg
 
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@MBAmtloin, can I suggest that you not delete the photos as you said you planned? Unless the photo is totally useless (no focus, accidentally took a picture of the pavement, finger over the lens, etc), I have found that those less-than-perfect images often are great memory items when you browse the images later. Historians are bemoaning the tendency to throw away those images that in a few decades might be useful to historians for what's in the background, not what the image was originally all about. One of the examples they cited was a photograph from Germany shortly after the end of WWI, when the photographer took a picture of a politician talking to people in the street. The importance of the image was not the politician, nor the people near him, but that there was a young man on the periphery that was identified as Adolph Hitler, one of the earliest photos of him known to exist. The picture of the politician was out of focus, but the young man was in perfect focus. Had the photographer thrown away the picture as "imperfect" the historical image of Hitler would have been lost. On a more practical note, I had a friend who had a fire at his home and lost a lot of items in it. The insurance company wanted a list of everything item-by-item. He didn't have an inventory, but he did have some pictures taken at a Christmas party. What was key was not the party, but the furniture in the background that could be listed for the insurance company. Eventually, the entire set of rooms lost was mapped out and a rather complete list compiled. Some of the furniture had drawers and with the image they were able to recall exactly what was in those drawers as well.

So, instead of throwing those images in the trash and erasing them, can I suggest you just archive them off to someplace to save the storage space? You may wish you had them back at some point.
 
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MBAmtloin

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thank for the advice MacInWin. I find your replies very interesting and detailed with great info!
i need (and did) to delete 100 from my flickr account that are not getting viewed anymore.
im allowed only 1000 (there are no shoe pics) or else!

Last year i donate many things, this year i sold an imac G4 that only needed a battery-but happy that the person is using that for medical research and will bring that to costa rica this year. Im selling a great cycling frame today i can't use anymore.
I am currently delete and remove photos from a drive that are horrible, dups or mbs hogers
the ex-HD needs more space for another timemachine update for high sierra.
 
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Lots of photos slow down computer

Welcome to the forum. As you have discovered, this is a very PG forum, so keeping the language cleaner will avoid all those asterisks.

On Photos, it is an app, not a filing system. You can create Albums, which can be handled like folders, to organize the images, but the option on the menu of "Photos" under Library in the sidebar will always show ALL of them. That is what it is for. If you remove an image from "Photos" it will disappear from everywhere else.

I'm not a Photos guru, but what you want to do may well be handled by Albums. You can create a new Album, let's say you name it "Melbourne Mayhem." Now you can drag individual or groups of images from the "Photos" page to the album on the sidebar to the left, drop them there and they will appear in "Melbourne Mayhem" until you remove them either from Photos or from the Album. You can have an image in more than one Album, so if one of the "Melbourne Mayhem" images also works for another album, one named "Melbourne friends" for example, you can drop it from Photos into that album as well.

Photos is actually a database. Every image is in the database in the general folder "Photos." You can then create new collections of those objects by opening Albums and tying the images to the Albums. Note that in doing that you are NOT creating a new copy of the image file just updating a database record to say that THIS IMAGE is now in both PHOTOS and MELBOURNE MAYHEM albums. One image, two references. Photos the application can and will suggest other organizations of the images, including what it calls "Memories" or images that seem to be associated together for some reason. I have Memories that are organized by locations, dates, people, events, objects in the images, etc. One memory is called "Together over the years" where Photos assembled all the images of my wife and me through all the years of the various pictures, no matter where or when it was taken. And once you get all of the images organized into Albums the way you want, you can just ignore the "Photos" collection in the Library on the sidebar until you import some new images and they appear there for you to sort. Shift your thinking from file/folder to repository/album and just let Photos collect in the repository to be entered into an album.

One other benefit of the way Photos works is that the original image is always in the database. If you do an edit, let's say to crop an image, then save it, what gets saved is the original, plus the edits. Edit again and the database has the original, the first edit and then the second edit. If you decide the edits are all wrong, you can go back to the original. And you don't have THREE copies of the image file, just one, with a smaller item for just the edits. The overall database doesn't grow by replicating images with edits, it just has the original image and what you did to it as you edited. When you open the image, the original is retrieved and the edits applied to show you what you expect. Magic!

So let me suggest you put away that ol' PC way of thinking and embrace how Photos works. It really does work pretty well if you use it the way it was designed.

EDIT: By the way, I currently have 10,207 images in Photos, so it is certainly capable of handing that.

I always believed having lots of photos on my Mac slowed it down?
 
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I always believed having lots of photos on my Mac slowed it down?
Not really, unless the drive gets full, or if you try to edit a bunch of them all at once. I have about 20,000 images overall, only about half are in Photos and my MBPr mid-2015 runs just fine. And as you have heard, some folks have many more than that. Photos are just image files, having a lot of them takes up drive space, but until the drive gets above 80% used, will have no impact on speed.
 
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MBAmtloin

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the original poster mentioned something about "....like you did in PC" is there a difference or software on a PC besides windows media?
Windows 10 somehow makes folders of photo/pictures automatically form an iPhone after importing them in a sub folder by date.
photo needs to have these imported with the users permission or action, unless there is a way to skip that step?
 
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Photos is a database, as I said. If you want your photos in that database, you need to import them. Once there, it can show those images in various organizations, some of which it creates (years, locations, people, etc) and some that the user creates (Albums, collections, etc). But to get the images into the database, they must be imported.

I have no idea what Windows does. But simply organizing images by the date of the file is a very, very tiny subset of what Photos does.
 
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Thanks Jake great explanation ���� Very helpful! I have also more then 10K photos in the Photos app all stored in the cloud and originals on HDrive.

Works fine.
 
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Organising photos on your Mac

Not really, unless the drive gets full, or if you try to edit a bunch of them all at once. I have about 20,000 images overall, only about half are in Photos and my MBPr mid-2015 runs just fine. And as you have heard, some folks have many more than that. Photos are just image files, having a lot of them takes up drive space, but until the drive gets above 80% used, will have no impact on speed.

Many thanks for the reply. This Forum is a treasure trove
 
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What I do with pictures is something like how Windows does the task- at least the older Windows XP from last time I used it.
This plan might not suffice for your needs, but it is very simple to manage. (I also get lost using Photos.app. I like the K.I.S.O.G.method = Keep It Simple, Old Guy.)

At: Hard Drive - User Name there most likely is a folder titled Pictures. If it does not exist, you can make one either there or anywhere on the computer.
Next, you can make sub-folders by clicking Shift-command-click & then name the folder.
In my Pictures folder, I've got many, many sub-folders. Examples: Fish Climbing Purple Ladders or Flat Tires I Have Enjoyed Changing, etc.

Then, I just put your photos in the appropriate folders. I use Finder to look at the folder, sub-folders & photos. You can even highlight a photo & press the spacebar to get a preview. (At least on my El Capitan. Other OS versions may be different.)

Finder or Spotlight can search for your photos by name or part of a name. (Such as "Tire".) I'd imagine there is an application that can search by metadata, too. (Maybe Photos?)
You can sort the view by name, created date, modified date, etc.

This method may be much too limited for your needs, but it is close to the Windows method. Also, it kept me from having to learn Photos.app. (I do the music the same way. Trying to learn iTunes makes my head explode.)

Hope It Helps & Be Sure To Enjoy Today!
Paul
 
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MBAmtloin

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PBG1 There really is not a significant photo management difference from both OSX and Windows except My DellXPS imports and saves iphone/ipad photos in a monthly folder automatically. Windows 10 also auto-saves photos in folders titled "Screenshot" "Saved Photos" etc. which could be a inconvenience or a not depending on if you need to find a photo quick.

What photographers use is camera software from say, Nikon were i plop in the SD card, and use that Nikon software to edit, crop and convert the pictures in a folder of my choice that I need to post on line of send to a client.

Since Apple Photos was problematic back in 2008-2012 so i try to avoid using that program to edit or post onto websites. The program has progressed over the recent years to keep up with other software platforms.
 
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Since Apple Photos was problematic back in 2008-2012
Photos in 2008-2012 was really problematic as it didn't exist until 2014. I think what you meant was iPhotos, and that was retired in 2014 when Photos was released. Two different apps there.
 
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PBG1 There really is not a significant photo management difference from both OSX and Windows except My DellXPS imports and saves iphone/ipad photos in a monthly folder automatically.
Thanks MBAmtioin. That' interesting to know.
 

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