How Do You Export Multiple Albums in macOS Sierra Photos?

Select Albums View in macOS Sierra Photos

Question:

How do you export multiple albums in Photos in macOS Sierra?

Answer:

You can export multiple albums in one fell swoop in Photos in macOS Sierra (this may work in previous versions). Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun explained how in Mac Geek Gab 623, and this is what you do.

Get to Albums

From any other interface in Photos, click the gray Albums header in the left sidebar, as shown below. It looks more like a label than a button, but click away.

Photos View in macOS Sierra Photos - Click Albums in the Left Sidebar
Photos View in macOS Sierra Photos – Click Albums in the Left Sidebar

Click the Arrow, If Necessary

On the Albums view, you may see individual photos from the last album you were in. If so, click the arrow in the header to get back to the root Albums view.

Click the arrow to return to the main Albums view
Click the arrow to return to the main Albums view

Albums View in macOS Sierra Photos

Clicking that arrow will take you to the root Albums view where you see all of your albums as thumbnails, as shown below.

macOS Sierra Photos Albums View
macOS Sierra Photos Albums View

Select Multiple Albums

From here, you can choose to export entire albums just by clicking on them. But if you shift-click, you can select multiple albums at one time and export them all at once. In the image below, I’ve chosen three albums from my sparsely-populated Photos library—they’re outlined in blue.

Select Multiple Albums in macOS Sierra Photos
Select Multiple Albums in macOS Sierra Photos

File Menu Export Options

File Menu Export Options in macOS Sierra Photos
File Menu Export Options in macOS Sierra Photos

It’s not immediately obvious you can do this, but it’s pretty simple once you know.

This question was originally answered on MGG 623: macOS Sierra Tips and Tricks and More!

About MGG Answers:

Each week Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun provide some great troubleshooting advice to listeners of the Mac Geek Gab podcast. Here with MGG Answers we share some of those tips with the rest of the world!

2 thoughts on “How Do You Export Multiple Albums in macOS Sierra Photos?

  • Looking at your screenshot: “Export 2,396 photos…”. But that’s not albums being exported. It’s either all selected albums dumped into one humongous folder, or a DD-MM-YYYY subfolder structure. Any way to export six albums such that you get six folders, one for each album?

    Come on, Apple, it’s 2020!

  • This does not truly copy the album. At least it did not when I followed the procedure. It copies the photos in the album, but it does not maintain the order the photos were in in the original album. Photos is a terrible replacement for iPhoto in so many ways. Please complain to Apple at every opportunity. This new platform and Sierra have created a huge amount of unnecessary headaches for long time users.

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