Exporting photos from Mac "photos" onto external hard drive

the photos become jumbled out of order in my hard drive. I've attempting to rearrange the files by "date created", "date added", "date modified", etc. and nothing has proved to be a solution. Anyone know how to fix this problem?

There is no fix because, as far as the Finder concerned, there is no problem. It works off File metadata, not the Exif metadata. So the date of an exported file is the date is was created. The Photo contained in the file has it's date and so on contained in the Exif Metadata - which is what photo applications use.

So what are you hoping to achieve here? What sort of organisation are you trying for in the Finder? Let us know and perhaps we can make suggestions to help.

Lastly: be aware that drag and drop from Photos yields a preview of the image that is missing added metadata and is not full quality. It's designed for things like a handy email version and so on. If you want the best quality always use the File -> Export command and make your size and quality selections there.

That is not a good way to release space. It would be much better to move your whole Library on to an external disk, as described here:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

Make sure you read the two notes at the bottom of the article under 'Learn more'.

Stephen

Ah - that's a different question. My answer was based on your wanting to save disk space on your laptop and it would result in having the library file on the external disk being used by Photos. All that would change is the physical location of the data. (And, of ocurse, you would need to have the disk connected to use Photos.)

If you want to export your pictures so that you can manipulate them outside of Photos, I can't advise you as I have little or no knowledge of alternatives. Using Finder doesn't seem very versatile or functionally rich, though.

Good luck with your search.

You could either export modified (if you have modified them by adjusting dates etc and want to keep the changes) or unmodified originals (my personal preference because there is no generation loss).

Then use some 3rd party tool like GraphicConverter or exiftool etc to change file creation / modification dates based on EXIF date (or some other metadata date via exiftool). If there is no metadata date yet, or if the existing is wrong, you can adjust it with those tools.