Using Albums to Organize Images

Albums let you organize your images into groups without affecting their location on your hard drive. Albums are a useful way to sort your images into groups or categories such as people, places, and pets.

What Are Albums?

Albums are virtual storage locations. Think of them as playlists for your photos. A song on your hard drive can live in a playlist based on the artist, the year it was released, or the musical genre it belongs to. So can a photo. One photo can be assigned to multiple albums. These might be named for the subject, where the photo was taken, or the event where the photo was shot.

How Are Albums Different from Folders?

When you move an image between albums — or even move one image into multiple albums — the folder structure on your hard drive doesn’t change as it does when working with folders. Also, if you delete a photo from an album, it remains in its original folder both in Luminar^AI and on your hard drive.

Creating an Album

Creating albums is an easy way to organize your photos.

1. To create an album, select a single image or a group of images in your Catalog.
2. Click the Add Album button (the small + button to the right of the word Albums) in the Catalog panel. A new album will be created named “New Album,” and the image or group of images you selected will be placed in that album. You can also create a new album by selecting an image or images and choosing File > New Album or by pressing Cmd+N (macOS) / Ctrl+N (Windows).
   

3. When you first create an album, its name will be highlighted so you can easily rename it. Give your new album a descriptive name.

Renaming Albums

You can rename an album at any time by right-clicking on it and selecting Rename from the pop-up menu. It’s possible to have two albums with identical names, so be careful when naming albums so you can easily find your images in the future.

Copying Images Between Albums

Dragging images from one album to another puts those images in a new album without removing them from the first album. For example, you may have photos of people in your Paris Travel album and also want those photos in your People album

Removing Files from Albums

Removing an image from an album is easy, and after doing so the image file will remain in its original folder on your hard drive and in your Catalog.

1. Choose the album you want to remove an image from.
2. Select the image you want to discard (hold down the Shift key to select a range of images).
3. Press the Delete key.
   

Your images will be removed from the selected album. However, they will still live in other albums and their original folder(s). Removing an image from an album does not affect the original file on your hard drive.

!Warning: If you select Move to Trash on an image in an album, all instances of that photo will be removed from any albums it has been assigned to and the original file will be moved from its folder and placed in the Luminar^AI Trash collection.