One of my photo albums suddenly reorganized itself. I organized the photos in a specific way and changing it will be very difficult as it has over 7k photos and videos. I didn’t change the sort order or anything, it just suddenly changed. How do I change it back?
iPhone XS Max, iOS 16
I've had this happen (though, luckily, I don't keep albums with 7000 pictures!) I'm afraid you will need to resort.
Manual sorting of pictures in an album works but, since there is no way to reproduce the order, if something disrupts the order, you're stuck.
I have decided to put titles on my pictures that include the order, and then sort by title. I use Photos Workbench ($29) to batch change the titles once I've put them in order. Photos Workbench works like this:
I put the pictures in an album in the order I want, and then I give them titles indexed to that order. There are many choices that you can arrange in the title as you want. Then, even if the album is lost or they just move around, you can re-create the album's order.
I do use albums with thousands of pictures when first organizing a set, but I keep them in smaller albums inside of folders to make it easier to manipulate.
I've had this happen (though, luckily, I don't keep albums with 7000 pictures!) I'm afraid you will need to resort.
Manual sorting of pictures in an album works but, since there is no way to reproduce the order, if something disrupts the order, you're stuck.
I have decided to put titles on my pictures that include the order, and then sort by title. I use Photos Workbench ($29) to batch change the titles once I've put them in order. Photos Workbench works like this:
I put the pictures in an album in the order I want, and then I give them titles indexed to that order. There are many choices that you can arrange in the title as you want. Then, even if the album is lost or they just move around, you can re-create the album's order.
I do use albums with thousands of pictures when first organizing a set, but I keep them in smaller albums inside of folders to make it easier to manipulate.
There's a free AppleScript, Batch Change Title to Text w/Padded Sequential Numbers, that can rename all photos selected with a common title plus an increasing sequential number which, when sorted will be in the order you created the titles. It's from these user tips: Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related User Tips.
You would need to run this script to remove all existing titles before applying the renaming script:
(* Batch change the titles of the selected photos to the capture time
How to use this script:
- Select all photos you want to change the title of in Photos
- Open this script and run it by pressing the "Run" button in the toolbar.
- The script will read the capture date from the selected images and create a short date string according to the system preferences for the short date format in System Preferences > Language & Region > Advanced
- The script will return the last date of the last photo it changed
- if you save this script as an Application you can add it to the Dock and run it from there
This script has been tested in Photos version 1.0, with MacOS X 10.10.3
© Léonie*)
(* select at least 1 image in Photos *)
tell application "Photos"
activate
set imageSel to (get selection)
if (imageSel is {}) then
error "Please select at least one image."
else
repeat with next_image in imageSel
set new_title to null
tell next_image
set the name of next_image to the new_title as null
end tell
end repeat
end if
return "Adjusted the titles of " & (the length of imageSel) & " photos. The last date is " & ((the date of next_image) as date)
end tell
If you have Time Machine setup and running you can recover the library from just before you found the album to be messed up and recover the order that way. If you have to go back in time so that you might miss new photos added you can do the following:
1 - recover the TM library to another volume.
2 - with the paid version of PowerPhotos you can merge the current library into the TM library and have PowerPhotos remove duplicates OR if you know what the newer photos are just copy them from the current library into the TM library.
Photo album changing
