I have created all shared albums by adding the photos one at a time to ensure the correct order to tell a story. But then my shared albums are very short, no more than 50 photos in one album, as I do not want to dump to many photos onto the devices of the subscribers. And I am adding a comment to the photo immediately when I am sharing it. When we share the photos individually, the caption is automatically added to the comment field. Adding a comment later can mix up the sort order of the public web page and the sorting will be lost again. One more thing - everytime we add a photo or a comment to a shared album, the subscribers will get an alert. We should be considerate and only invite subscribers, once the album is complete, or the subscribers might feel harrased, if they have already been invited while we are still creating the album.
Which system version is running on your Mac?
In Photos 7 on macOS 12 you can sort shared albums according to the date and time. It will sort them on your Mac, but not on the devices of the subscribers.
Chris Bunch wrote:
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The source photos are ordered the way I want them by having sequential filenames. .....
........But Mac users who have been accumulating photographs the original way, using Photos.app doesn't seem a good proposition for sharing them with others.
Are your photos scanned prints or slides? It helps a lot, if you manually tag scanned photos with a data and a location. This will sort them chronologically in your Photos Library and you can find them by the capture date in the Moments, Collections, Years (or in the more e recent versions of Photos in the Days, Months, Years).
When I am importing scanned prints or slides taken at the same day at the same location,
- I arrange them in an album in a useful chronological sequence.
- Then I try to guess a useful date and location and tag the first first photo in the album with this date (Image > Adjust Date & Time) and add a location by typing the name of the place into the Info, if the photo does not yet have a location. For most photos I use HoudahGeo to assign GPS coordinates before I import the photos.
- Once the first photo in the album has been correctly tagged, I run an Apple Script to copy the date and the location to all other photos in the album. The time will be incremented by steps of one minute, so the photos will keep the order when sorted by the time (the script is imitating the batch change of the date and time from iPhoto). My script is here -it is lifting and stamping all metadata from the first photo, title, description, keywords, date and time, location: Script: Lift and Stamp all Metadata from … - Apple Community . If you only want to batch change the date and time, try this: Script: Batch Change the Date and Time to a Fixed Date
As your dates and times are in the filename, you could try to adapt this script to copy the dates from the filename to the date files: Steven Weyhrich's Script: ApplesScript to batch change date of scanned photos based on filename - reformatted
For shared albums it will only help on macOS 12 Monterey, the first system version to allow to sort Shared albums by the capture date, but properly tagging the scanned photos with the capture date and time and locations is making them much more accessible in the library. I am even tagging the sans withs the name of the camera model and the lens, if I remember which camera I used to take the photos. Modifying EXIF tags of Originals Using exiftool: camera, lens, gps
