I imported several hundred photos from a phone into my laptop Photos. They all show up in photos on the same day, though they were taken over a period of years. How can I get them to sort by date taken, not date imported?
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15
Matti Haveri said, "Apparently the photos do not have internal metadata dates"
Based on the convoluted way you got the pictures to Photos, that's likely the problem.
But I imagine another possibility, just in case: Where do you see these pictures all together? Is it in the Recents view? Those places called Library and Recents, etc, are not real albums--not like the ones you make yourself. These are special pre-set ways to view your pictures. The "Recents" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order they were added to the Library-- not necessarily in the order they were taken. If a bunch of pictures are added at the same time, then they show up in a random order.
The "LIbrary" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order your pictures were taken. This can't be changed. These albums always provide the same view so that, when something goes wrong or seems off, you (and we) can depend on them always showing the same thing, and there's no chance that someone snuck in and changed the order or removed pictures.
If you put your pictures into an album that you make ( in the Photos, select your picture and then do File>New Album with Selection,) then you can put them in order by creation date-- if that is included in the metadata.
Matti Haveri said, "Apparently the photos do not have internal metadata dates"
Based on the convoluted way you got the pictures to Photos, that's likely the problem.
But I imagine another possibility, just in case: Where do you see these pictures all together? Is it in the Recents view? Those places called Library and Recents, etc, are not real albums--not like the ones you make yourself. These are special pre-set ways to view your pictures. The "Recents" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order they were added to the Library-- not necessarily in the order they were taken. If a bunch of pictures are added at the same time, then they show up in a random order.
The "LIbrary" view shows all the pictures in your Library in the order your pictures were taken. This can't be changed. These albums always provide the same view so that, when something goes wrong or seems off, you (and we) can depend on them always showing the same thing, and there's no chance that someone snuck in and changed the order or removed pictures.
If you put your pictures into an album that you make ( in the Photos, select your picture and then do File>New Album with Selection,) then you can put them in order by creation date-- if that is included in the metadata.
Apparently the photos do not have internal metadata dates. Many social media sites like Facebook and WhatsApp delete dates and locations.
Sometimes it requires detective work to guess the date and then manually set it right. Just recently my son sent me photos from his phone but most of them then had no other dates but the current import date. I asked him to browse his phone and some of those photos were from WhatsApp, some from Snapchat etc. Those apps' databases gave hints about the dates when the photos and the movies were either sent or received so I regarded them as the best guess and set the dates accordingly. Some WhatsApp images might also have a date in the file name and that is also a good start to star guessing when the actual image was taken. A while back my daughter complained that I had incorrectly set such an image a few years too early because "I did not have such hair then".
chrisfromwaterford wrote:
the photos were taken by a Samsung Flip phone, and I had to transfer them by text message to my phone, upload those to Amazon photos then download to my mac (they would not email even when I reduced the file sizes)
Ouch. Lots of steps where the original metadata dates could very well have vanished. Thanks for the update!
Next time try to transfer a small batch via USB from the Android phone (there are macOS apps for that but I have not checked which one currently works the best), for example, and check if that workflow works better for you.
Thank you! I'm not a sophisticated user, so metadata is a mystery to me... the photos were taken by a Samsung Flip phone, and I had to transfer them by text message to my phone, upload those to Amazon photos then download to my mac (they would not email even when I reduced the file sizes). I'm sure there's an easier way . But I will go in and approximate the days taken - that will at at least get them in the right vicinity!
HI, and thanks for your reply. As the previous respondent suggested, I just went through and adjusted the date and time of the photos (which previously said the import date) to the approximate date they were taken, and now they seem to be in the right place in the library!!
chrisfromwaterford wrote:... just went through and adjusted the date and time of the Photos
Cool!
sorting imported photos by date taken
