Photos for OS X: How to generate album automatically at import

Question

In iPhoto I relied heavily on the events feature. I had about 100 events. In Photos for OS X I'm totally ok with the new albums that replaces events somehow. But I am looking to automatically create an album of the pictures I import.

In iPhoto you could drag a folder into the program and it automatically created an event with the name of the dragged folder. Is there some similar mechanism to automatically create an album? The only way I found to create the similar behaviour is to drag a folder to Photos for OS X, import all of the photos, go over to the last imported section and create an album out of these images. Is there a better workflow?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Edit: I read the question here (Events or Albums in Photos for OSX) but it doesn't help me very much unfortunately.

Answer 1

I just wrote a small Apple Script to import folders and their subfolders as folders and albums into Photos. Have a look at it here: https://github.com/codez/ImportPhotoFolders. You probably need El Capitan to have it work correctly.

Answer 2

There's no way to do this in Photos, at least differently than what you're already doing.

Also, just as an aside - if you intend to use iCloud Photo Library and sync with a device, replacing events with albums will very quickly become unmanageable. Apps (outside of the iOS Photos app) do not necessarily sort them by anything useful, and do not respect folder structure, from what I've seen. I'm currently going through my "albums" (that Photos created from my iPhoto events) and tagging them with keywords and/or descriptions, then removing the album. It's impossible to find anything in (for example) Facebook Messenger's photo chooser with 500 albums. The keywords won't carry over to iOS, but at least I can use Moments to somewhat recreate the Events feature.

Answer 3

I use the following AppleScript to import folders into albums. It only does one folder at a time [1] but even so that's a lot easier than doing it by hand in Photos.

[1] Because folders with large numbers of images can be slow to process in Photos and sometimes the script will timeout waiting for Photos to finish. With one folder this is not a problem as it will still have been imported completely.

(*
    Imports a folder of images into Photos into an album named after the folder.
    Whether the images are copied or aliased depends upon your Photos preferences.
    No error checking!!
*)

tell application "Finder"
    activate
    choose folder with prompt "Please choose a folder to import into Photos as an album:"
    set theFolderToImport to the result
    set theFoldersName to the name of theFolderToImport
    set thePhotosToImport to the files of theFolderToImport
    set thePhotosToImportAsAliases to {}
    repeat with b in thePhotosToImport
        set a to b as alias
        set the end of thePhotosToImportAsAliases to a
    end repeat
end tell

tell application "Photos"
    activate
    delay 2
    set theNewAlbum to make new album named theFoldersName
    import thePhotosToImportAsAliases into theNewAlbum with skip check duplicates
end tell

Answer 4

I will answer in German to allow all Germans to find this wonderful solution, which helped me to import all my Folders Thank you very much a great solution: https://github.com/codez/ImportPhotoFolders. Wer bislang ein Programm gesucht hat, welches die Ordner und Unterordner vom Finder mit allen Bildern nach Fotos importiert der soll bitte die Lösung benutzen: https://github.com/codez/ImportPhotoFolders. das hat bei mir wunderbar funktioniert.