Need to find a group of pictures quickly? Hook yourself up with Photos for OS X's smart albums.
Smart albums have long been a great way to quickly organize your images without the hassle of having to manually add each individual photo. Photos for OS X, like iPhoto before it, has an easy and quick way to build a Smart Album — read on for a quick tutorial!
How to create a smart album in Photos for OS X
Smart albums are relatively simple to create: Visit the Albums tab, then click and hold the plus (+) button in the toolbar and select Smart Album.

A small window will drop down from the main Photos screen and ask you to first name the Smart Album, then add conditions. Like other workflow-type actions, Smart Albums use a series of if statements to automatically select a certain subset of your images. For instance, if you wanted to see all your edited photographs, you could make a condition that said "Photo [is] [edited]".

You can also stack conditions by pressing the plus button: Here, I've created an album that will only show me edited photos that I took with my iPhone.

You can build a wide variety of conditions into your smart albums, including photos contained in a specific album, keywords, camera model information, aperture setting, Faces, and more.
Once you're happy with your album, press OK to create it in the Albums section.
How to edit a smart album in Photos for OS X

Not happy with what your smart album returned? You can tweak the conditions by clicking on the gear icon next to the Smart Album's title.

From here, you'll be able to edit conditions using your original conditions screen.
Smart albums and iCloud Photo Library
Smart albums are a wonderful way to organize your images in Photos for OS X; unfortunately, they won't currently sync with iCloud Photo Library, so you won't see them appear on your other Macs or iOS devices.
Reader comments
How to use smart albums in Photos for OS X
It is really a shame that Smart Albums are not synced over iCloud, as they are a great way to create custom collections of photos.
I agree! It's the most powerful way to create albums in iPhoto. It's astounding that it wouldn't be supported in iCloud Photo Library.
Hi appreciate some help making a smart album to show only photos without any keywords. Thanks!
I hope you don't have many keywords, because you'll have to make the Smart Album criteria list them all as:
"Keyword *is not* blahblah" (where blahblah is replaced with each of your keywords, one per line).
...then make sure it says Match 'All' at the top of the list.
It sure seems that Apple is asleep at the wheel these days, because iPhoto actually allows you to set a criteria on one line that says "Keyword is none". Why the heck would they remove that option from the Smart Album criteria in Photos???
Sigh...
Thank you! I have 22k+ pics and lots of keywords so I guess I would have to hold my library cleanup until the update. I miss iPhoto's geotagging and places features as well :(
This was going to be my EXACT question. This is the feature that I miss most and I was also quite disappointed to see that none of my Smart Albums migrated from iPhoto to Photos, that there's no star rating system (which I used heavily for fast sorts and selections) and that I can't select more than 1 album at a time in order to rearrange them.
I have deleted half of my former 14,000 photos as I clean things up in Photos, and organized then photos into albums. But I only show half of the remaining 7,000 photos in albums. I don't see how to use a Smart album to find only the non-album photos so I can then decide whether to add them to an album or delete. Thanks
Hi NWJJ
Try creating a Smart Album with the following conditions:
"ALBUM" + "IS NOT" + "ANY"
At least it seems to work for me... :-)
Best regards,
Jesper
thanks - but to create a smart album apple forces me to use one of their preset conditions. I don't see how to put in search conditions as you recommend.
1) How can I add and remove individual photos from a Smart Album from another album?
My Smart Albums seem to have a lot of irrelevant photos in them
2) Delete - if I delete a photo in an Album or Smart Album will I lose the photos from PHOTOS and ALL PHOTOS as well.
Thanks Cathy
Follow replies to me Follow all comments
Why repeat the above three times at the end of my query?
To bad keywords didn't import correctly from iphoto to photos in any of my galleries!! keywords don't work...and smart albums don't work. terrible.
photos is a D- from a power user of iphotos!
Photos - I am going to end up bald - I waste so much time on Photos - Duplicates is making me pull my hair out! I spend hours trying websites to do something about duplicates, not very successful but have managed to get them down to 10k but now they are back up to 15k. I even spend time manually deleting from Photos Moments and low and behold they come back on again. Has anyone managed to successfully get rid of the duplicates in Photos?
Hi guys
Try creating a Smart Album with the following conditions:
"ALBUM" + "IS NOT" + "ANY"
At least it seems to work for me... :-)
Best regards,
Jesper
Sorry for spamming all of you... My post was only the solution to the problem posted by NWJJ... Was supposed to post the reply to him.
Hi, please cd u tell me :
How to delete a photo ONLY from the smart album, -newly created-, but NOT from the global photo stream?!
+
How can I add new pictures to an existing smart album?
Thanks a lot