Albums

Folders are where your photos are kept; an album is what you show someone. Only an album is shared — a folder never is.

An album is a list of photos — from any folder, from All photos or from a search — in the order you give them. Putting a photo in an album moves nothing and copies nothing: the album only lists it. The photo stays in its folder, can be in as many albums as you like, and takes no extra storage. On every plan, an album holds up to 2,000 photos and you can have up to 1,000 albums; for a bigger shoot, make an album of each folder inside it.

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Make an album from a folder

When a folder already holds the shoot, choose New album from folder… from the folder's ⋯ menu (or right-click the folder), keep the folder's name or type another, and click Create. The album opens, ready to share.

It holds the photos in the folder and in every folder inside it, as they are when you make it: the folder's own photos first, then each folder inside it in the order the left column lists them, each one's photos by file name. After that it is an album like any other — photos you add to the folder later are not added to it on their own, and moving or renaming the folder changes nothing in it. The album remembers the folder, though, and offers the new ones when you open it. To add others, select them and choose Add to album….

Unfiled — the photos in no folder — has no New album from folder…: select its photos and add them to an album instead. A folder holding more than 2,000 photos (the most an album holds) says so in the dialog, before anything is made: make albums from the folders inside it, or select the photos to add.

Pick photos for an album

1. Select the photos — tick the box on a photo's corner — in a folder, in All photos or in your search results. They can come from different folders.
2. Choose Add to album…, first on the bar that appears.
3. Click an album to add them to it, or type a name under New album and click Create. An album without room for them all is greyed out and says how many more it takes.

Add to album… is also in a photo's ⋯ menu, for that photo or the selection it is part of, and on the bar above a photo in the viewer, for the photo you are looking at. New album beside Albums in the left column starts an empty one.

From inside the album

With an album open, Upload at the top of the page becomes Add photos. Its From your library… picks photos without leaving the album, on any of its tabs — an empty album also has an Add photos button of its own. Choose All photos, Unfiled or a folder on the left, type in the search box to narrow them down, and click the photos you want — click again to put one back. Your picks are kept while you move between folders, so you can take a few from each. Photos already in the album are marked In album and can't be picked again. Add puts them at the end of the album, in the order you picked them.

An album holds up to 2,000 photos, and a photo already in it keeps its place.

Upload into an album

With an album open, Add photos at the top also has Upload photos and Upload a folder, and dropping files or folders onto the album does the same. When your storage is full, only the uploads are unavailable: picking photos from your library takes no space. The photos are uploaded to your library as from All photos — files into Unfiled, a folder as a folder of its own — and then added to the end of the album, together with any of them that were in your library already. If the album can't take them all (it would pass 2,000 photos), none is added and they stay in your library; the message at the end says so. More in Uploading photos.

New photos for an album

An album you make from a search — select photos while a search or a filter is on, then Add to album… → New album — remembers that search. One made with New album from folder… remembers the folder, with every folder inside it.

When you open the album later and photos have come in that it doesn't hold — photos you uploaded since that match the search, or photos now in the folder — a line above the album says how many:

12 new photos match the search this album was made from.

Nothing is ever added on its own: an album you have shared changes only when you add photos to it. Photos in the trash are never suggested, and neither is a photo you took out of the album with Remove from album. If the folder an album was made from is deleted, the album stops suggesting photos.

Your albums

Albums sits in the left column, under your folders. An album with a live link carries a link mark. Under them, Shared with me lists the albums others have shared with your email address (only the people they add) and the ones you kept from a link with Keep in Media Moana; click one to open it — see Albums shared with you.

Click an album to open it. Under its name and how many photos it holds are three tabs: Preview, how the people you share it with will see it; Photos; and Share, who can open its link and how it goes out. An album with photos opens on Preview, an empty one on Photos. Beside the name is where its link is — "Draft · not published", or, once published, how often it was opened ("Published · Seen 12 times") — then the album's one orange button — Share, which takes you to the Share tab, or, once its link is published, Copy link — and its ⋯.

On Photos, the album's photos are in the same grid and viewer as the rest of your library, and above them the same layout and tile-size buttons as the rest of the library (all but Map) and Arrange. Filters and sorting don't apply in an album, and typing in the search box searches All photos.

Above the photos are the album's cover and description. Once its link is published, they are joined by how often it was opened — "Seen 12 times · last opened 2 days ago" — and, once a visitor has loved a photo, how many hearts it got, with Loved by visitors to show only those photos. See Visitors, views and hearts.

In an album, Remove from album comes first in a photo's menu and on the selection bar. It takes the photos off the album's list; they stay in your library, in their folders and in any other album.

An album's menus hold what the album and the people you send it to need: Remove from album, Set as cover, Edit, Process…, Download and Add to album… (to put the same photos in another album). Renaming, moving and cloning a photo change where it is kept, so they are in its folder: Show in folder in a photo's menu opens its folder with the photo selected and scrolled into view, ready for the folder's actions, and your browser's Back button brings you back to the album. In the viewer, the folder's name in a photo's details does the same, from anywhere in your library. Process… and the editor's Save copy make new photos in a folder — next to the originals, or the one you pick — and the album stays as it is: add them from their folder once they're done.

Delete from library is last in a photo's menu, and not on the selection bar. It moves the photo to the trash, which takes it out of every album it is in and off every link that shows it — so its confirmation offers Remove from album instead.

Order, cover, description and captions

An album keeps its photos in the order you give it: new photos go to the end, and to move them, open the album's Photos tab, choose Arrange and drag photos into place — or focus one, press Space, move it with the arrow keys and press Space again — then Done. Arrange shows the same tiles as the album, as squares, at the tile size you pick above them, each numbered with its place.

• Several at once: click photos to select them (or use their check), and Shift-click to select every photo from the last one you clicked. Drag any selected photo and the others go with it, together and in their order. Move to start and Move to end do it in one click.
• Sort: Sort puts the whole album in one order to start from — by date taken, oldest or newest first (a photo without a date taken goes by its upload date), or by name, with IMG_2 before IMG_10. Undo puts back the order it had, until you do something else.

Every move is saved as you make it; a published share page shows the new order once you publish your changes.

Any photo in an album can be its cover: Set as cover in the photo's menu. Until you choose one, or once that photo leaves the album, the first photo is the cover.

From the album's ⋯, Add description… (or Add a description… on its Photos tab) gives it a short note in plain text, up to 2,000 characters; Edit description… changes it, and saving it empty takes it off. The album shows its cover and description at the top, and so does its share page, with the photos in your order — how it lays them out is the album's template.

Each photo can have a caption of its own: open the photo in the album, open its details (ⓘ, or press I) and choose Add a caption… at the top. A caption is plain text, up to 500 characters, with line breaks if you want them; Ctrl + Enter (⌘ + Enter on a Mac) saves it and Escape leaves it as it was. Empty it and save to take it off. A caption belongs to the photo in this album: the same photo in another album has that album's caption, or none. On the album's share page, visitors see it under the photo when they open it — see What visitors see.

To see the order, the cover, the description and the captions as the people you share the album with will, open the album's Preview tab — where an album with photos opens: the album in its template and with the details beside each photo — What visitors see —, both of which you choose there, wherever it lands: its page on a phone or a computer, the card a pasted link shows, the printed pages, the photo frame.

Draft captions and chapter titles

Writing a caption for every photo takes time. From the album's ⋯, Draft captions… writes a first one for you: a short sentence for each photo that has no caption yet, from what is in the photo and where and when it was taken. When the album uses the Story template, each chapter without a title gets one too — "Lanterns at Fushimi Inari" over "Day 1 · Kyoto".

• Nobody sees a draft but you. Each waits under To review until you Accept it — as it is, or after changing it — or Discard it; Accept all and Discard all take the whole list. An accepted caption is the photo's caption, like one you wrote. An accepted title heads its chapter, with the day and the place above it; it stays listed under Chapter titles in the same dialog, to change or remove. Titles show while the album's Captions and the album's description is on, as captions do — see What visitors see.
• It works from text, never the photos. It reads what the analysis found in each photo, the names of the places and the dates — so a draft may name a city even when the album doesn't show places. Read them before you accept. A photo that has a caption or a draft keeps it; a photo not analyzed yet is left out.
• It uses AI actions: one AI action for every 50 drafts, rounded up — a caption and a chapter title are a draft each — up to 200 drafts at a time; draft again for the rest. The dialog says how many it will use before it starts, and a draft that couldn't be written isn't counted.
• It needs photo analysis. With analysis off in Account → Privacy & GDPR, there is nothing to draft from, and the dialog says so.

Rename, delete

An album's ⋯ — beside it in the left column (or right-click it), or beside its name on its page — has:

When photos leave an album

• A photo in the trash is not shown in any album, or through any link. Restore it and it is back in its albums.
• A photo deleted for good leaves every album.
• A photo you remove from an album takes its caption there with it; add it back and it starts without one.
• Deleting a folder puts its photos in the trash, so they drop out of their albums until you restore them. The albums themselves stay, and so do their links; an album made from that folder stops suggesting new photos.