Importing pictures in a specific order to Photos on Mac

In Photos on the Mac you can sort pictures in an Album by Date Captured, by Date Added, or by Title. You can also manually arrange the pictures in any order by dragging them around. But the full Library only allows pictures to be arranged by Date Captured or Date Added. Sort is under the menu View>Sort.

Pictures coming in from another source may take different paths through the internet or through the computer's multiple cores, so sorting by Date Added can give unpredictable results if you give it a bunch of pictures all at once. If you add them one at a time, though, then Date Added will work.

Generally, Photos uses information about the image, not about the file that holds it, so Photos does not pay attention to the filename, for instance. However, for pictures that don't have metadata, Photos uses the file creation date for the Date Captured.

When I have pictures that I'm arranging for a slide show that I want to be in some custom order, I drag them around to the order I want. Then I add titles with an index number so I can sort them by title in the future.

To check out the metadata dates, I had suggested this:

If the pictures are files in a folder, try opening one in Preview or Photos and see what it has for the date and time, and in the caption and title fields. Does it look right?

Apparently you haven't done that, but let's suppose all the dates are OK. And, by the way, jpg and jpeg are the same, jpg=jpeg. But the format doesn't matter at all-- it's the dates in the metadata inside the picture file that counts, as we've discussed.

Much of this is from previous posts:

• In Photos' menu "File>Import" select your folders
• Go to the Desktop and select your two folders. (Select the first one, then command-click to select the second)
• In the Import window select check "Keep Folder Organization

• Click Import. You'll get two folders each with an album inside. These are listed in the Sidebar under Albums.
• Select all the pictures in one of the albums and choose File>New Album with Selection
• Select all the pictures in the other album and drag them to the new album
• Name all the albums something that makes sense to you.
• In the new album, choose View>Sort>Keep Sorted by Oldest First.
• Then you select all the pictures, and choose File>Create>Slideshow>Photos. This makes a Slideshow Project, and you can adjust the slideshow there.
• Projects are at the bottom of the sidebar

Booberoi wrote: … so if I have say one hundred pics taken with iphone/camera and put them in a file on mac - what do you suggest I do with each pic before I import to Photos so they are in order as I took them?

I'm not sure what you mean by "taken with iphone/camera and put them in a file on mac." Do you mean that these picture are files in a folder? Or have you printed them to a pdf file?

It depends on how these pictures go to a "file." Often emails and texts strip the metadata from a picture file.

If the pictures are files in a folder, try opening one in Preview or Photos and see what it has for the date and time, and in the caption and title fields. Does it look right?

But you haven't answered my question about the metadata being intact.

If the metadata date shows as being correct, then you put the pictures into an album and sort by date created.

The you select all the pictures, and choose File>Create>Slideshow>Photos. This makes a Slideshow Project, and you can adjust the slideshow there.

As Richard has already pointed out Photos will let the user sort the photos as they wish after they have been imported to the library. This screenshot shows the different sort orders possible in the different views in the library:

[Edited by Moderator]

Booberoi wrote: I still dont understand what to do -

But you haven't answered my question about the metadata being intact.

Also, when you say "folder," do you mean albums in Photos or folders in Finder or what? This is all on a Mac, right?

Once the pictures are in albums, you just select all the pictures in one album, drag them to the other, and click the menu "View>Sort>Keep ordered by Oldest First"