Ugh - every time I have to work 'through' rather than 'with' Apple's software I keep wondering how a company with such deep empathy for its hardware use has such apathy for users' data. Here is yet another example of Apple simply ignoring our data and the effort we put into creating it. I had to come up with a convoluted hack simply to get somewhere back to where I was. 

I finally got around to upgrading my iPhoto library to Photos after El Capitan was released. The biggest reason for holding out was that Photos had no compelling features for me, a lot of little bugs, performance issues and that it did away iPhoto's 'Star-rating' system (a ranking of photos from 1 through 5) in favor of a single on-off toggle of 'Love'. I get where they are going with this. Most people probably didn't bother to rate their photos. However, I meticulously rate them. Have been doing so for over 10 years. My collection of 50k photos is almost all fully rated. All my albums are then smart albums based on whether a photo is 3-stars or better or 4-stars or better and so on. I selectively sync smart albums to all our iOS devices.

When I upgraded, all my smart albums were messed up. I expected that but they were messed up in a way much worse than I had anticipated or planned for. I knew that Star-ratings would be changed to keywords but I didn't realize that my smart albums would be ruined this badly. See image below as an example. Photos decided that any smart album that had any rating-based condition (so all my smart albums) must drop all - other - conditions and try to be smart about ratings a bit. So, 'Match All' with 'Rating>3' was changed to 'Match Any' and the rating condition was changed to a Keyword = '4 Star' or '5 Star'. However, dropping the keyword match on 'New York' completely defeats the purpose of the smart album. 

My workflow requires that I 'rate' albums and be able to create smart albums with conditions that are equivalent to stating - 'give me photos ranked 3 stars or better along with some other conditions'. Since Photos Smart Albums (unlike iTunes) do not allow you to create nested and-or conditions, you are left with flat 'Match All' or 'Match Any' which cannot be used to express complicated conditions. 

So, the hack I've come up with is to create what I am calling as keywords with 'Inclusive Ratings'. An 'Inclusive Rating' is adding keywords that indicates the highest rating and then also adding keywords that indicate all lower ratings up to the highest rating. So a photo with '5 Star' keyword  must also have a '4 Star' keyword, a '3 Star' keyword and so on. 

To make this work, I had to add to my '5 Star' photos  '4 Star', '3 Star', '2 Star' and '1 Star' keywords, and I had to add to my '4 Star' photos '3 Star', '2 Star' and '1 Star' keywords and so on. Logically I am saying that anything that is a given star 'includes' all prior stars. So, a '5 Star' photos is also a '4 Star', '3 Star', '2 Star' and '1 Star' photo and that makes sense. It wasn't hard to do so. I made a temporary smart album of all '5 Star' keyword photos, select them all, and use the keyword manager to add all lower keywords to all photos as shown in the image below.

I did the same thing for the '4 Star' smart album and tagged all photos with '3 Star', '2 Star' and '1 Star'. I repeated this process for '3 Star' and '2 Star' as well. Then I was able to finally create a Smart Album using the condition shown below to match the results from the original iPhoto Smart Album. The image below would make a Smart Album that would include all New York photos that are '4 Star' and '5 Star'. 

So, a lot of heartburn but not a lot of work and I was back to my workflow. Phew!

However, this works fine for historic photos but I have to do this annoying thing on an ongoing basis. But wait - I had an idea for that too because I use Lightroom. 

Since I process all my photos in Lightroom and then export only the selected ones into iPhoto (and now Photos), and since Lightroom's keyword management is so awesome, I am now using the Lightroom Keyword Synonym concept to automate the process of 'inclusive rating'. As an example, I created a '4 Star' keyword in Lightroom and added all 'lower' ratings as synonyms. See image below. When I export these to Photos everything works as Lightroom tags photos with the keyword and all synonyms as well and I no longer have to manually 'rate' photos in Photos. I only have to do this in Lightroom which I was doing anyway. 

So why use Photos at all? Three reasons broadly.

• iOS Photos app. Nothing works as flawlessly and as brilliantly as the iOS Photos app and since the iOS Photos app will never work with Lightroom, I am stuck with Photos. Lightroom Mobile is getting there but not quite there yet. One big miss right now - You cannot sync Lightroom Smart Collections with Lightroom Mobile whereas you can sync Photos Smart Albums with iOS Photos.
• Photos is much easier to navigate and works really fast as a 'display only' photo management solution. I like it for that. It also shines when it comes to making Calendars and Books. 
• Live Photos. iPhone 6s has live photos and only Photos can show live photos.

Why upgrade from iPhoto at all? Well, iPhoto has been dead for years and it will be gone shortly so I have to move on. For me Photos brings nothing new in terms of features. I am not using iCloud Photo Library. Given Apple's history of apathy for users' data. I have no desire to use their cloud services.