I can no longer sort people and pets by name in Apple Photos

Hannes Hofer wrote:

I just found out that you no longer sort from the main "View" menu. Instead, there is now a "Sort" button to the far right of the "People and Pets" heading when "People and Pets" is selected. This button allows you to sort alphabetically. Perhaps that button has been there all along, but I have never noticed it before.

That is great, Hannes. Thanks for pointing this out.

Now I can see a new "Sort" item in Photos for Mac as well - to the far right of the heading "People & Pets". There I can sort by name.

But is very confusing that the "Sort" command in the View menu is dimmed and set to "Oldest first". Sorry, my Mac is currently set to German and it is inconvenient to restart it right now.

I am having the same problem after upgrading to macOS 26.1.

The Sorting for the People&Pets album now seems to be fixed as "Oldest first". when I try to rearrange the People by dragging them into an alphabetic order, the list will automatically be rearranged by the date I have named the face. It is impossible to find a person this way. I have to use the search field.

I am only having 846 named people and Pets right now. It used to be a lot more, but quite a few did not survive the upgrade.

I suspect the developer team does not expect us to name so many different people, only the closest friends and family, but I am using the People album to name the photos of people I am only meeting occasionally, so I can remember what they are called, before I meet them again. And so I need a People album for more than thousand different people, not just the pictures of friends and family. Friends and family I can recognize in a photo again without having to add names.

My People&Pets album in macOS 26.1 is still in the same unsorted custom order that it has been for several releases. It was alphabetical within thematic groups (family, friends, others), but oddly some past release split the "others" groups into two alphabetical lists that I've never bothered correcting. Now all the pets seem to cluster near the end of the "others" group (but not quite together).

Recent additions have been made at the end, so the order needs some adjustment, but now you have me worried that trying to fix the few issues will ruin the residual order.

iOS 18:

In iOS 18, View>Sort has ascending, descending, as well. In this special Sort menu, the arrow indicates which way it will sort. So if you click Sort by Name, it sorts one way, and the next time it reverses it.

I hadn't really paid attention to to that before!

When I tried to move the new items appearing at the bottom to their correct alphabetical potion, the existing sort order changed for the other items. You may want to make a current backup before trying to move items in the People and pets on Tahoe. Better safe than sorry.