macos - managing photos across devices & external drives

[marthom45]

apologies if this is not exactly the right forum but my Mac is running Big SUR, i'm sure there are people on here experienced in this kind of thing.

there is lots of info out there but I still cannot find anything that I can understand & implement so any help is appreciated in advance.

firstly, I do not use iCloud other than the free 5gb, so that option is out.

I have a couple of iphones, my wife has an iphone11 & mine is a new 12, we also have a Macbook pro (now at Big Sur), we have photos across all these devices as well as in folders on an external drive. Not all photos exist on every device, its a myriad & confusing how I get to a point where they are all in sync.

here is my plan (in my head), I'd appreciate your thoughts.

1. I aim to get every photo onto the Macbook, that will become my single truth, I can sync the 2 x phones & also import into the mac photo library all the pictures from the HDD - that should be everything I have.
2. I will use a duplicate photo remover, i found one that seems to work ok, this will remove most duplicates & probably somethings that aren't but i'm ok with that, its doing more good than harm.
3. Now I aim to sort a lot of these photos into Albums, things like holidays, id like easy to access folders/albums of each holiday we have been to over 30+ years, other photos I will leave for the app to organise, i.e. people etc.
4. which is best, create an album, a smart album or a folder - all seems to organise my photos but this step is important for my next question - I think.
5. once my mac is the single truth & organised as I want, I then want to push those photos back out to the phones & HDD BUT keep the album (or folder) structure that the photos were organised into on the Mac.

is that possible, seems perfectly reasonable to me but I suspect it cannot be that easy.



Mark.

 

[mikzn]

I use Photos 6 (Big Sur Version) to download all photos from all devices into "Photos 6" and then have one place (Photos Library) with all photos and easy to back up - just copy the library to another external drive. Also easy to manage buy date - location - albums - etc

PowerPhotos is great for duplicates after you complete merging photos and movies from all your devices.
PowerPhotos - for managing Photos and iPhotos libraries - I have purchased both versions and no regrets - great software and very useful info

Here is link to a similar thread - all photos in one Photos app

 

[marthom45]

I think I have sorted this, I have created a bunch of smart albums that organise my photos into albums where where the metadata exists, for those that don't have the correct metadata I will have to tag them as I find them. What I also found is that these Smart Folders don't sync between the Mac & the iPhone, however if you create a standard album & then copy the photo's from the smart album into the normal album & then sync, voila! the album & photo's sync to the iPhone, I was slightly caught out as they don't appear in the normal "albums" are in the iPhone photo's app, you have to scroll to the bottom & you will see a section called "from my Mac" - in here are my neatly organised folders & photos.

Mark.