How to Organise the Hidden Photos in Photos for Mac (MacOS 11 Big Sur)

by: léonie

Last modified: Jan 20, 2021 7:10 AM

26 9391 Last modified Jan 20, 2021 7:10 AM

This user Tip has been written for Photos 6 on macOS 11 Big Sur. For Photos 5 on Catalina see: Managing Hidden Photos in Photos 5 on Catalina

Hidden Photos are very useful to remove temporarily photos we do not want to see among the photos we are currently working with from the main Photos albums in the Library views. The hidden photos will not appear in the Places album or in the Memories, for example. I am hiding many photos others have sent me, so they do not appear among my own photos in the Days view or in my albums. I am also hiding older edited versions of my photos, when I create a new version of the same photo. One problem with the Hidden Album is, that it is quickly filling up and hard to manage, because we cannot structure it directly with folders and subfolders. And hidden Photos do not appear in the searches.

There are two powerful tools to manage the Hidden album.

We can use the "Showing" Filter
We can create our own custom Hidden Album Hierarchie with Smart albums.

To keep hidden photos more secret, we can hide the Hidden Album with "View > Hide Hidden Photo Album". This way it will be less likely, that we accidentally open it.

Since Photos 4 on Mojave the Hidden Album can be filtered using the "Showing" filter. Using the filter, we can select subsets of the hidden photos by filtering for edited items, Favorites, photos or videos, or keywords or a combination of these criteria (How to use the Filters in Photos 4.0 - Apple Community).

To work efficiently with hidden photos and videos, it will help a lot to tag our photos with keywords to find them quickly in the Hidden album and to add the keywords to the Quick Group of keywords in the Keyword Manager.

Building our own hierarchical view of albums with hidden photos:

To get started with organising the hidden Photos in albums organise them in standard albums and group the albums in nested folders, while you can still see the photos. When done, hide the photos by selecting all photos in the album and use ⌘L to hide them. The albums will now be apparently empty, but they are still in the album. Now create a smart album for each standard album to make the photos visible again. (File > New Smart Album).

Combine the rule for the smart album with "Match All" and add a rule "Photo is hidden".

For example to see the currently hidden photos in my album "Restaurieren", I am using this smart album:

Any smart album with the rule "Photo is hidden" will show the hidden photos matching the constraints of the smart album, even if the Hidden Album is hidden.

Photos that I do not want to appear in any album, I am tagging with the keyword "Neverland". And the smart albums are each smart album to show hidden photos has the added rule "Keyword is not Neverland". You could also simply drag the photo to an album named "Neverland", before you hide it. Then set up your smart albums for the albums with hidden photos like this: