Why are photos in the library sorted oldest to newest? Why would I want to scroll through 18,000 photos to see the latest ones? There must be some way to do this!!! It's absurd.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.2
Have you checked out the Recents or the Imports views?
The Library is just a list of all your stuff. At the public library they put the books in, maybe, Dewy Decimal order. You can't change that.But you never start at the beginning of the library and look through them all to find the one you want. You look it up in the card catalog, or the computer version of that.
In Photos, the Library view is the list of your pictures. They're in date order. They've even made it easy to scroll though years and months. Nicely, they've also included a Recent view, where they're ordered by upload date. And so on.
Most of us keep our picture in Albums. An Album is a catalog of pictures. I have an album for "19 04 21 Birthday" with all the pictures I took on my granddaughter's birthday that year. I also have an album "Martha" with all the pictures of her in it. Some of the pictures are in both, of course. But the albums are like card catalogs-- each is just a list of the pictures that fit that category. Even though a picture may be on the lists of two different albums, there is only one copy of the picture.
We also use "Smart Albums" with criteria like:
To get pictures in a date range. Or we might use "Person-is-Martha" and "Keyword-is-Birthday" to collect all of Martha's birthday pictures together. Or "Person-is-Martha" and "Keyword-is not-Birthday" to get the others.
By the way, adding keywords to pictures and using the Keyword Manager provides powerful search techniques-- way more ways to find pictures than the old card catalogs.
Have you checked out the Recents or the Imports views?
The Library is just a list of all your stuff. At the public library they put the books in, maybe, Dewy Decimal order. You can't change that.But you never start at the beginning of the library and look through them all to find the one you want. You look it up in the card catalog, or the computer version of that.
In Photos, the Library view is the list of your pictures. They're in date order. They've even made it easy to scroll though years and months. Nicely, they've also included a Recent view, where they're ordered by upload date. And so on.
Most of us keep our picture in Albums. An Album is a catalog of pictures. I have an album for "19 04 21 Birthday" with all the pictures I took on my granddaughter's birthday that year. I also have an album "Martha" with all the pictures of her in it. Some of the pictures are in both, of course. But the albums are like card catalogs-- each is just a list of the pictures that fit that category. Even though a picture may be on the lists of two different albums, there is only one copy of the picture.
We also use "Smart Albums" with criteria like:
To get pictures in a date range. Or we might use "Person-is-Martha" and "Keyword-is-Birthday" to collect all of Martha's birthday pictures together. Or "Person-is-Martha" and "Keyword-is not-Birthday" to get the others.
By the way, adding keywords to pictures and using the Keyword Manager provides powerful search techniques-- way more ways to find pictures than the old card catalogs.
I did and created an album with all photos and set the sort order to latest and it accomplished that. But why should I have to do that?
[Edited by Moderator]
It depends on which view you're using in the library. The following screenshot shows the various sort option in the different views in the library:
Recents is one that is fixed. However, you can create a smart album with the following criteria:
to get all of the photos and videos in the library. Then you can sort them any way you'd like.
I want newest to oldest regardless of vVew. These options don't change that. Sort appears like this in Photos for me. Even Recents starts with my oldest picture.
This screen shot seems to imply that I don'r need to haver them sorted by oldest date first, but this option can't be changed as far as I can tell. It's grayed out and clicking on it does nothing.
Nothing in Settings either.
I know those work, but I couldn't find a Smart Album option for all pictures, or any option that would work for me.
I'm just going to request the feature and until it is available consider it a typical Apple Know Better bug.
Try a smart album like I posted and see what the sort options are via the View ➙ Sort menu option is.
Didn't you look at the screenshot I posted showing how to create such a smart album?
Sorry moderator.
But now I realize that Smart Albums don’t appear on the iPad or iPhone where I really want to see latest first.
Recents is still sorted oldest to newest. I want newest to oldest without having to change date ranges.
Changing Sort Order in Apple Photos Library...Mac iPhone iPad
