Group photos by place using Smart Albums

You can create a Smart Album of photos taken in a particular place or region. As you import photos, they’re added to the Smart Album according to criteria you specified.

To create a Smart Album using Places:

  1. Click to select Places in the Source list.

    If you’re in full-screen view, click the Places button.

    Important:  You must be connected to the Internet for the Places feature to show photo locations on the map.

  2. To select a specific location, do one of the following:

    • Click the red marker pin that represents the location you want for your Smart Album. The marker pin turns yellow.

    • Choose a category (in the top-left corner of the Places map), such as a country or city. Photos taken in the chosen location appear in the main viewing window.

    • Drag the zoom slider until the map shows only the pins marking the locations you want in your Smart Album.

      If you need to center the pins, you can drag the map around inside the frame.

  3. Click the Smart Album button.

    Image of Show Photos button in Places view

    The new Smart Album appears in your Source list. If you’re in full-screen view, click Albums to see your new Smart Album.

    Image of Smart Album in Source list

  4. Click the placeholder name, and then type a new name for your Smart Album.

To create a Smart Album manually:

  1. Hold down the Option key while you click the Create button and choose Smart Album from the pop-up menu.

    Image of Create button

  2. Type a name for your album in the “Smart Album name” field.

  3. Choose Place and then “contains” from the pop-up menus.

  4. Type the name of the place (for example, “Travels in U.S.” or “Mom’s house”), and then click OK.

    Your new Smart Album appears in the Source list.

    Image of Smart Album in Source list

    If you’re in full-screen view, click the Albums button to see your new Smart Album.

After you import new photos, you can add location information to any photos that don’t already have global positioning system (GPS) data embedded.

If the location (or GPS) information matches the specifications set up for a Smart Album, those photos appear automatically in that album. For example, newly imported photos with “Paris” as part of their location information appear in a Smart Album set up to contain photos taken in Paris.