Smart Album not working in Photos app on macOS Sequoia

sab2624 wrote: … "Album is not any" criteria started excluding large numbers of photos that are in the library for those years. …

I often use the "not any" criterion, and I haven't noticed a problem.

You're using Sequoia, so you can select a picture and use the new menu choice "File>Show in Album:"

to get a list of albums (and folders) that a picture is in. You could use this to double check if Photos thinks that a picture is, in its mind, in some album, and then look there to see what's goin on. You may find some pattern in the missing albums.

Have you tried this? What have you found?

"Events" is an artifact from the discontinued iPhoto app. I have an Events folder left over from the

transfer years ago. Many of those pictures in there I've transferred to albums in other folders, but I'm never sure I want to get rid of the Events. Maybe it's nostalgia?

Now you've made me decide to go back and make sure none of those Events pictures are isolated from other albums…

Th "iPhoto Events" are usually created , when we migrate an iPhoto Library to Photos. As there are no events in Photos, the iPhoto Events will be saved as albums. So each and every photo will be in an events album, right after the migration from iPhoto (or Aperture).

I deleted the iPhoto Events first thing after migrating the iPhoto Libraries. In the early versions of Photos these albums were behaving erratically.