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iPhoto

Use less-than-full-day periods in Photos’ Smart Albums

Update: With the passage of time—one calendar day, in this case—I can now say that this hint is wrong. Photos does not respect partial day values. Instead, any value less than one is rounded to zero, so all you can really do is create a Smart Album that finds imports you made during the current calendar day. That is, Date Added - is in the last - 0 - days. This is what I'm using now, as it's better than one day, which actually shows two days (today and yesterday), but it's not as nice as iPhoto's Last Import album.

I've left the hint up, because it's been linked to and tweeted a few times, but it's wrong. Sorry for the lack of testing before I posted it.

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An in-depth look at moving from iPhoto to Photos

As noted in prior posts, I've recently moved to Photos from iPhoto. So far, it's been a mixed experience. There are some elements of Photos I like, but as of today, those things are outweighed by the things I don't like.

I've vented on a number of the things I dislike on Twitter, but wanted to expand on both the positives and the negatives in more detail. Hence, this "one week in" review (of sorts) of Photos, from the perspective of an experienced iPhoto user.

I've also included some tips for working with and migrating to Photos for those who haven't yet made the move from iPhoto. Finally, if you're still reading, I've listed the key features I'd really like to see come to Photos in a future update.

Note that I am not a great photographer, but I do take a lot of photos—I have over 40,000 photos and a couple thousand video clips in my database. To keep things organized, I use lots of keywords and Smart Albums, so much of my feedback on Photos is concerned with those areas of the program.

First off, my time with Photos hasn't all been bad; there are some things that I really like in Photos…

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Gain control over Photos’ floating windows

As a recent somewhat-forced convert to Photos, I'm struggling with a number of things—more on that coming in a future post. But one of the tougher adjustments for me is that Photos uses a floating Info window, whereas iPhoto had an embedded info panel.

I keep the Info window open all the time, because I do a lot of work with keywords and location. (I also like to keep the Keywords window open, though this one was also floating in iPhoto.) I resize the iPhoto/Photos window quite often, depending on what I'm doing with other apps—sometimes I want my photos covering the screen, sometimes I don't.

In iPhoto, this isn't an issue (dark-background iPhoto GIF), as the info panel is attached to the main window. In Photos, though, resizing the main window leaves the Info window floating in space (light background Photos GIF).

I don't like the big gap, either visually or operationally, so I wind up moving the Info window next to the newly-resized main window.

There are a few solutions to this problem, the best of which only Apple could provide. They could make the Info window a panel below the photos, or they could make it magnetic so that it would stick to the edge of the Photos window, even as it resizes. I don't suspect we'll see either solution coming from Apple, though.

Instead of waiting for Apple, I used one of Many Tricks' own apps, Moom, which (among its other tricks) has the ability to save window layouts, either within an app or across many apps.

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Create ‘and/or’ Smart Playlists in Photos

I've recently—begrudgingly, forcibly—migrated from iPhoto to Photos. My iPhone 8 Plus was the main impetus, as Photos supports its new movie and image formats, as well as providing some additional editing features that I can't get in iPhoto. But in my limited time with the new app, my general conclusion is that Photos is not designed for someone who likes to actively manage their photo collection.

I may have more to say about this in a future post, but for now, consider this style of Smart Playlist that I used a lot in iPhoto…

This structure effectively creates an "and and or" logic, where you can have all conditions must be true at the top, yet have an "or" on the keyword: This playlist finds media that have the keyword Midnight or Moonlight (our cats), and are videos.

You simply cannot build this structure in Photos, because the Keyword field is a tokenized pop-up; you can only select one value. If I list the keywords as separate criteria, I wind up with a Smart Playlist that only finds videos with both Moonlight and Midnight. That's not what I want.

This structure is useful whenever you have multiple individual things—kids, lets say—and you want a smart playlist that will find any of your children and any other criteria, like year or camera or whatever.

My first thought at a workaround was to create a Smart Playlist called The Cats, which simply had the two Keywords as "or" criteria. I'd then create a second Smart Playlist that had one criteria set to "Playlist is The Cats" and the other set to find only videos. But Photos won't let you use a Smart Playlist as a criteria (neither will iPhoto, for that matter).

After some fiddling, I came up with an ugly but functional solution: I have to use an extra keyword. Now, any time I add photos of either cat, I have to set two keywords: One with the cat's name, and the other is The Cats. With two keywords on every cat photo, I can use this Smart Playlist to make my "video of either or both cats" Smart Playlist:

I'll have to do the same for our children; each picture of Erica or Kylie will also get a The Kids keyword. It really shouldn't be this hard; Smart Playlists should work as do Finder searches…

Perhaps in Photos 4…or 5…or 6. Sigh.