iMovie Import Photos Out of Order

This worked for me: Select all photos/videos within iPhoto and drag them directly onto the iMovie timeline.

It's weird that dragging from the media area within iMovie puts them into the reverse order -- tried many things to change that but nothing worked for me.

The Photos-out-of-sequence issue has frequently been reported on this forum.

From the iMovie View menu you can sort by Name, Date, or Duration. One can also sort clips by inserting them individually into the timeline in the desired order. However, as you have mentioined, you have lots of photos that makes manually sorting them impractical.

If the photos are in your Photos app, you can arrange them in the order that you want in and album. Then open the album, select all the clips as a batch, and then do a File/Export __ Photos/Sequential to export them to a Finder folder on your desktop. You want to set the File Name to "Sequential" in the Photos export box. The photos will appear in the desktop folder in the same sequence you set in the Photos app. From the desktop folder, drag the photos as a group into an iMovie timeline and they will retain their seaquence. It seems that dragging them into the My Media browser will preserve the sequence, but in reverse order. However, when you drag them from My Media into the timeline they will come in in their proper sequence (not reversed).

-- Rich

I'm new to this Community Discussion.

I have just bought a Mac Mini with Ventura as the OS. I had a iMac prior to this with OS Catalina. On Catalina in Photos, Albums were configured Old to New, and then transferred to iMovie as Old to New. Fine, it worked. I don't think I had problems with iMovie in all the years I had it. For the last 6 years I've had a YouTube Channel, made something like 120 videos of which 86 are public videos.

Now with Ventura, Albums are configured correctly, but photos are incorrectly set in iMovie New to Old. This is a huge problem, as all photos will start incorrectly - and as Rich839 correctly says - it's impractical to then manually correct. It's also the word I use, but there are plenty of other words I could have used!

When I was searching on the internet to see about this problem, I came to this discussion, and it's clear this has been going on for years. From 2019 - 2022 there was a new OS each year, starting with Catalina. Catalina works. Big Sur I don't know whether it works correctly or not. Monterey and Ventura don't work.

This is my question: does anybody know definitively whether Big Sur is configured correctly?

Thank you.

barrie130,

I can't help with Big Sur as I have never used that OS.

Can't you just import the clips into an iMovie Event and do a View/Sort Clips by/ Date/Ascending? Then drag them as a batch into an iMovie project.

-- Rich

Great. The workaround is a bit awkward, but at least accomplishes the goal.

However, it should work totally. Did you find that some photos still were out of sequence?

-- Rich

Hopefully most of them were in order.

-- Rich

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the quick response. I'll have a look and get back to you.

Barrie

I had a short look. Even getting a New Event doesn't appear to work, it's shaded out.

No, it's simple for Apple to just correct the error they've made.

To create a new Event, one must first select the library's name in the sidebar. Then do File/New Event.

-- Rich