Photos in the "Recent" Album is all out of order

Recents shows all your pictures in the order they have entered the system. For instance, if you duplicate a picture it will have the same capture date, but Recents will show it appearing recently, as it did. The idea, here, is that this album always provides the same view so that, when something goes wrong or seems off, you (and we) can depend on it showing the same thing, and there's no chance that someone changed the order or removed pictures.

If you want an album that has all the pictures in Recents but in capture order, you can create a new album of your own (choose Albums and hit + at the top) and name it My Recents, or something. Then select all the pictures in Recents and go to Share/Add to Album. Then you can sort them in order of creation date.

ChowSaiHou wrote: Is there an explanation as to why my older photos who were previously entered into the system a few years ago now are also out of order as well?

The way Recently organizes pictures seems to change, occasionally. It could be a system update or, when you said, "A couple days ago I backed up my photos via icloud and also imported photos from my iPhone to my MacBook" there may have been some changes that Photos thinks are recent. Hard to say without being able to re-run the process.

The Recents album is sorting the photos by the date they have been added to the Library.

You can see this on a Mac, when you open the Recents album and go to the menu "View > Sort". There the sort order is shown as a fixed sort order that we cannot change. However, the "Date added" for a photo can change and then the sort order will change.

Occasionally Photos needs to rebuild the library - for example after a system upgrade or after Photos has crashed badly, it may need to rebuild the library. At that point, when Photos is rebuilding the library, the photos may be added to the library in a different order and this will change the "date Added" and thus the position in Recents. The "date added" is not supposed to be stable over a long time, only for the most recently added photos.

As you are using iCloud Photos you could create the smart album recommended by Old Toad on your Mac. Add the photos from this smart album to a standard album, call it "My recents", and let iCloud Photos sync it to your iPhone.

But to see your photos on the iPhone sorted by the date taken you could simple use the "All Photos" tab in the Library on your iPhone instead of Recents. "All Photos" is always sorted by the date taken. I am using the All Photos tab a lot. It is more stable than Recents. And if there should be photos sorted incorrectly, in an unexpected place, these photos may have a wrong date assigned and the date needs fixing.

Downgrading to the earlier version will not help, if it is still possible at all. Photos would have to create a downgraded library from your iCloud Library and this might also mix up your "Recents".

It happens to me all the time as well, OT. And it is very revealing. I am noticing more and more how many differences there are still between Photos for Mac and Photos iOS or iPadOS. Some things I can only do on the iPhone easily in Photos, some things are a lot easier on my Mac.

Since Recents includes all of the photos and videos in the library just create a smart album with this criteria:

Then you can sort them any of these three methods:

ChowSaiHou wrote:

There’s not a way to do that on iPhone, is there?

No, sorry. The iPhone or iPad do not yet support smart albums in Photos.

Aggggggggggggggh! I hate this new community organization. I keep missing the Author's iPhone notification in their first post and answer as if it were for a Mac.