Why AlbumFiler?

AlbumFiler is your go-to tool for finding albums and folders in Apple Photos. No more endlessly scrolling through the sidebar in Apple Photos to find that one album or folder. Say hello to AlbumFiler!

Background

Photos is Apple's photo management and editing application. It was launched as part of the OS X Yosemite (10.10.3) release in April 2015. It replaced both iPhoto and Aperture as Apple's primary application for users to store their photos and videos across all their devices, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS.

For the past nine years, millions of people across the world have been using Photos to store their cherished memories. You can imagine how many albums and folders these people must have created by then!

The Scrolling Conundrum

Photos presents its list of albums in multiple ways:

• List

• Grid

• Search

List

On the left-hand side of Photos, user-generated albums and smart albums appear underneath the My Albums section. You can expand this to see a list of albums and folders.

Users can create additional sub-folders to contain more folders, albums, or smart albums.

Once the list becomes lengthy, finding an album requires excessive clicking on small triangles or visually scanning for a specific name.

Grid

Click on the My Albums section header in Photos to see your list of albums and folders in a grid. Folders display a small thumbnail of up to four sub-albums, and albums show a square thumbnail. Users can enlarge the size of the thumbnails by using the slider at the top of the Photos application. Having larger thumbnails helps, but this reduces the total number of items displayable in a window. This means more scrolling and more searching.

Search

Photos analyzes and indexes a lot of metadata in your photos and videos such that it wants you to use the search bar to find things like people, places, and albums. Typing the partial name of an album may make it appear in the list of search results. However, if there are more than a few matches, Photos will display a See All link on the right hand side of each search results section. If you are searching for a particular folder or album, this can take a long time.

Enter AlbumFiler

AlbumFiler, building on MsgFiler's foundation, offers the fastest way to find your user-generated albums and folders in Apple Photos. AlbumFiler indexes all of these items and allows you to search for them quickly using just the keyboard.

Actions

Once you've found your album or folder, what can you do? AlbumFiler offers the following quick actions:

• Open Folder

• Open Album

• Import Files into Album

• Import Selected Media Items in Photos into Album

• Start Slideshow with Album

You can even drag and drop images from the desktop right onto an album to import them into Photos.

With AlbumFiler, searching for albums and folders becomes so streamlined that the traditional methods in Photos simply can't compare.

Currently, AlbumFiler does not display user-generated smart albums. The workaround is to group all of your smart albums into a folder. Then, in AlbumFiler, search for that folder and click the button to show it in Photos.