More Photos Q&A: Dealing with limitations in multiple libraries, smart albums, and more
Unfortunately, there’s no option to switch among collections or libraries in iCloud. For any given device or computer, you’re pairing iCloud Photo Library with an iCloud account. You could create separate iCloud accounts for different libraries and maintain different OS X accounts to switch among them. But since there’s no similar facility in iOS, it would be a huge mess to swap iCloud accounts to show a different library there.
The more reasonable choice is probably to pick an entirely different cloud photo service for one of the libraries, like Amazon’s or Google’s, and not enable the controls in OS X or iOS to integrate all your pictures taken or uploaded to your computers and devices. They have their own apps and websites that let you access separately.
Dave Sadler misses a feature in iPhoto that allowed him to tag unlabeled faces, particularly critical after upgrading to Photos, as many of his smart albums are unusable since the options associated aren’t available.
He notes that he used to have a smart album for each year using these criteria:
But it seems as if the first condition, “face is unnamed,” is missing with Photos.
That’s correct: you can only have a condition that matches or doesn’t match a given person’s name (in part or whole), but not photos that have no faces identified in them. I’ve checked in Photos 1.1 in El Capitan, and the same is true there.
Jeffrey Battersby asks:
You’d think so, but there isn’t! There also doesn’t appear to be a workaround Terminal hack that lets you set a default that can’t be managed from Photos’ preferences. (This is true in both Photos 1.0.1 and Photos 1.1.)
Michele Lieske deleted photos months ago in iPhoto, but when upgraded to Photos in OS X, they’ve seemingly come back from that land where travelers typically bring no report. She writes:
The only thing that would make sense is that the deleted photos in iPhoto weren’t emptied from its trash, which is a separate operation from deleting (iPhoto > Empty iPhoto Trash). If they remained in that temporary trash, it’s possible that Photos imported them and restored them to their previous locations.
The only way around this would be quit Photos, launch iPhoto, make sure its trash is deleted, and then re-import the library into Photos.
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