How to recreate your user albums structure on the target device?
Beginning with version 3.2 PhotoSync can now automatically recreate your user album structure from your iOS device as a folder structure on your target device when you transfer your photos from your camera roll to your preferred target. If you assign a photo to an album in the iOS photos library, the photo is still part of the camera roll and a reference to this photo will be put into the album to which is has been assigned.
If you have many albums on your device, PhotoSync helps to prevent you from going into each album one by one to transfer the photos from these albums to your preferred transfer target when you want to keep the album information as a folder name on the target for each album. With the new Auto Create Directories option in the Create Sub-Directories settings of each transfer target in PhotoSync you can just transfer your camera roll over to your preferred target and let PhotoSync create album folders for each of your camera roll photos that is assigned to an album. This means you can backup all your photos with one single transfer operation by backing up your camera roll keeping the album assignments of your camera roll photos.
Auto Create Directories puts your transferred camera roll photos into a folder with the name of the album if you have chosen to create folders with album names in the Create Sub-Directories settings (like the default Device name + album name setting). Instead of using the Camera roll album name, PhotoSync uses the name of the album to which the photo is assigned to. If the photo is assigned to more than one album, PhotoSync will create additional copies of the photo and put it into each album folder. Using the Auto Create Directories option will duplicate all your album photos into the album folders on the target because file systems work different than the photo library database on iOS which only 'links' the originals from the camera roll into the albums.
To deal with the duplicates on your target, PhotoSync introduces an additional setting called Avoid Duplicates that will not create the duplicated photos in your camera roll folder on the target, then a photo was automatically created into an album folder. With this setting turned on, PhotoSync will put all album photos into folders with the names of the albums but not additionally into the camera roll folder. This means that only the photos that are not assigned to any album will end up in the camera roll folder on your preferred target
To show you these two settings in action, we prepared an example for you: On an iPhone we have a bunch of photos that are assigned to an album Holidays and some photos that are only assigned to the camera roll. We are going to transfer 8 of these photos from the camera roll to a computer. The first four photos are only available in the camera roll, the next four photos are available in the camera roll and assigned to the Flower Gardens album.
As you can see the four last selected photos are also assigned to the album Flower Gardens:
We want to transfer the photos from the camera roll to a computer. In the computer settings in PhotoSync we enabled the Auto Create Directories option but disabled the Avoid Duplicates option. Our folder creation settings will create two additional subfolders, one with the name of the device and another one with the name of the current album.
The photos will end up as expected on the target computer. PhotoSync created a folder Camera Roll which contains all the eight selected photos and it created a folder Flower Gardens which contains the four selected photos that are assigned to the album Flower Gardens.
Now we'll see how the photos transfer with the Avoid duplicates setting activated:
As expected, PhotoSync tries to avoid duplicates and only transfers the photos into the Camera Roll folder that are not assigned to an album on the device. All selected photos that are assigned to an album will be transferred into the folder with the name of the album, Flower Gardens in case of our example.
