How To Organize Google Photos Into Albums And Remove Them From Main Library

When you open your Google Photos account, you land on the main library screen.  This screen presents you with all the photos you’ve added to your account as well as photos that have been shared with you by other users.

The one nice benefit to having all the photos appear in the main library is that they are categorized by date.  The option to slide your mouse over the month/year scroll on the far right of the screen is very convenient.

But over time the main screen can become incredibly hard to navigate due to the large number of photos display.  If you are looking for a specific photo but you don’t know the date the photo was taken, you can find yourself endlessly scrolling through thousands of photos.

Organizing Your Photos Using Albums

Whether you decide to organize your photos by subject (“birthdays”, “mom”, “vacations”) or chronologically by date (“2009”, “March 2013”), albums are the most efficient way to get started.

Ideally, it would be great to have albums that can be created like folders with subfolders (“2019” => “birthdays”, “vacation”,  “2020” => “birthdays”, “vacation”, etc) .  Unfortunately that’s not yet possible.

Changing Your Album Sort Order

By default, photos that are added to an album are sorted oldest-to-newest.  To change the sort order, click the 3 vertical dots (ellipsis) at the top right of the album screen.  This will take you to the “more options” menu in which you can change the sort order of photos.

Removing Photos In Albums From The Main Library

When you move a photo to an album, it is still visible in your main library.  The only way to remove a photo from your main library is to archive the photo.

There is no quick way to add a photo to an album and archive it at the same time.

Here’s how to do it

From the main library screen, select the photos to add to a specific album.  Once you have added the photos (by clicking the “+” button on top right of screen), you’ll need to return to the main library screen and reselect the same photos.  This time, you will want to click on the 3 vertical dots (ellipsis) at the top right of the album screen and select “archive”.