cleaning up iPhone photo library

Albums are not duplicates of photos in your photo library. Think of them as nothing more than pointers to photos you've chosen to place in an album for easier access to them. But if you remove a photo from your library, they will be removed everywhere, including the album you pointed the photo to. Thus, you can't remove a photo as you'd like from the your maim photo album.

Dannymac22 wrote:

Yeah, but what that means is that if I have a thousand pictures on my phone, when I open up the Photos app, I'm confronted with ALL of them. You'd think if I put the photo in an album, at least it would be nice enough to hide the photo in the main library window. But maybe there is a way to just display recents in the main library window? Well, I guess they are already sorted by date, so I just need to scroll down to the bottom to see the most recent ones.

Yes, you can sort photos by date, week, month, year. You can use search to find similar photos or use a descriptive word to look for photos.

If you'd like to make a suggestion to Apple about how they handle photo organization, you can use this link --> Product Feedback - Apple

Are you using iCloud Photos? Then you can enable the Shared Library and can split your library between Shared and Personal Library.

• Move all photos in your albums to the Shared Library. You will still see them in the albums, when you view the Shared Library.
• When you view the Personal Library you will only see the photos that still need organizing.

It is very easy, just one click, to switch between the personal library and the Shared library. I am only keeping my best photos in the Shared Library. When I show photos to friends an family, I keep the iPhone set to the Shared library. I don't use the shared library for Sharing, just for organizing my photos.

Dannymac22 wrote:

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks.

It is not a bad thing. That also means you can have the same photo in multiple albums without using any extra storage space, since that would then require duplicating the photo. It would also lead to many duplicate photos that would be much more difficult to clean up without the loss of photos. Having a single "source of truth" for your photos allows creating albums that just contain links to the original photo and you can delete any album without the worry of photo loss.

In addition, it is also consistent with other apps that maintain a Library, such as Apple Music. The Playlists for music work the same way as an Album for photos. It may be more confusing for users to have each app manage a Library differently. You also would not want deleting a Playlist to lead to the loss of your music.

You're welcome.

Do you have a Mac? If so there is a solution within the Photos app. If you don’t, there are third party apps that will display just photos not in albums .

Open it