Sort photos by date taken

By using an album that you create. The albums created by Photos have non-changeable sort orders but with albums you make you can sort any way you'd like. This is a graphical representation of the various albums and their sort orders:

The best option is to create a smart album with the following criteria:

Then it will always have all of the photos in the library in it and can be sorted by date as you wish.

In Photos 6 on macOS 11.2 the All Photos album is already sorted by the capture date and not by the date of import.

For all predefined views, created for you Photos, you can see the fixed sort order in the menu "View > Sort", but you cannot change it.

Use "All Photos" to see the photos sorted by the date taken.

"Recents" and "Imports" are sorted by the date added. All predefined albums are having a specific, fixed sort order. Instead of changing the sorting, we are supposed to pick the album, that has the sort order we want.

As OT explained, we are free to sort the albums we create ourselves.

You don't have this All Photos view in your Photos 6 library?

Have you verified that the photos from Messages had the EXIF capture date correctly embedded? To find out drag it from the Message to the Desktop and open with Preview. Go to the Inspector in Preview and check the EXIF section for the date.

From your screenshot it doesn't appear to have the EXIF metadata as there is no lens information and that should be there. If the EXIF metadata is there it should look like this:

If there is no EXIF capture date the date of import is used.

No - if a photo doesn't have the content creation date embedded in the exif data, it doesn't have it anywhere else.

The question is - where did these photographs come from. If taken with a digital camera then they will certainly have dates in them when taken (assuming the camera date was set correctly) - some part of the process of getting them to you has stripped that out. Can you go back to the original source and get new copies?