Photos not sorting in chronological order on Mac

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Level 1

99 points

Photos not sorting in chronological order on Mac

I'm adding all of our old vacation photos into the Mac's Photos app. I'm on a M1 MacBook Pro running Sonoma 14.7.2 and using Photos 9.0. Both my wife and I took pictures on separate cameras (her iPhone and my Sanyo camera/camcorder) and each camera has been verified to have the correct date and time. I've been scratching my head for ages trying to figure out why the merged photos aren't sorting chronologically. I think I've discovered what's happening. There are clusters of photos imported from one device and within that cluster the pictures are chronologically ordered. Then there is another cluster from the other device and within that cluster they too are chronologically ordered. However, that all means that the flow of the combined imported pictures keeps jumping back and forth in time, between the clusters. How can I sort these pictures so that the merged set is fully chronologically ordered?

In the View → Sort menu there are no options to choose from. There is just the one, grayed out option that says "Keep Sorted by Oldest Capture Date".

MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)

Posted on Jan 25, 2025 12:21 PM

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Answer 1

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Richard.Taylor

Level 6

18,223 points

Jan 25, 2025 1:34 PM in response to Mick_M

Mick_M wrote: …… In the View → Sort menu there are no options to choose from. There is just the one, grayed out option that says "Keep Sorted by Oldest Capture Date".

Sorting is for Albums.

Most "Special Views" can't be sorted. "Library" is always sorted the same way--by capture date. "Recents" is always sorted by date added. You don't get to change those. (By the way, in Sequoia there's just one of those views, and you can sort it either way.)

It sounds like the time zones may be different in the two cameras. You can collect all the pictures from one of the cameras, perhaps with a Smart Album, and you can adjust the time in Photos with Image>Adjust Date & Time. If you select a bunch of pictures and enter the correction for the first one, it will adjust the rest by the same amount.

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Answer 2

Mick_M Author

Level 1

99 points

Jan 26, 2025 7:36 AM in response to Mick_M

So it turns out I'm all set now! Here's the solution (thanks to you guys). First off, you don't really need to change the time zone display using the terminal command, although it does help make things more obvious. Select a picture (or pictures) and bring up the info panel using ⌘i and then double-click on the date and time line at the top. That brings up the "Adjust Date and Time" dialog box and there you can clearly see the time zone used for the picture(s). The trick is to change BOTH the time zone and the time. First change the time zone, but don't click on "Adjust" yet. You'll see that the time of the picture changed. You now need to set the time back to what it was originally and then click on Adjust. Now it'll sort to the right place. Yay.

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Answer 3

Jan 25, 2025 10:53 PM in response to Mick_M

Fiddling with the time & time zone can fix incorrect sorting (see Old Toad's reply above). You might have to adjust both to get the desired effect.

Adding time zone to Photos Info panel makes spotting time zone errors easier:

Time zone display can be enabled in macOS 13-15 Ventura-Sequoia Photos.app by pasting the following command to Applications/Terminal.app and hitting Return key (re-launch Photos so it takes effect):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUTimeFormatStrings -dict-add "2" "HH:mm:ss z"

...and reverted to the default time zone-less display with:

defaults delete NSGlobalDomain AppleICUTimeFormatStrings

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Answer 4

Mick_M Author

Level 1

99 points

Jan 25, 2025 2:22 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

Thanks Richard - I believe you're right! However... While my wife's iPhone had correctly set itself to the right time zone (in China), I had just simply adjusted the time and date on my camcorder to the correct local values, but apparently I didn't touch the time zone which was still stuck in US EST. It's looking like I can adjust all of my pictures by -13 hours and they then align with my wife's pictures, however then the displayed date and time when I do a Get Info is wrong because it's indicating a completely different time of day compared with the reality in the picture. The dialog box that allowed me to change the date and time also allowed me to change the time zone. Any change to the date and time was successful, however any change I make to the time zone (e.g. from EST to China) doesn't hold when I close the dialog box and then open it again to see what happened. So now my question evolves to - how do I change the time zone on a picture so that I can maintain correspondence between the time of day implied in the picture and the time of day in the Get Info dialog box?

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Answer 5

Mick_M Author

Level 1

99 points

Jan 25, 2025 4:01 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

I meant the Info window in Photos. Sounds like Photos can't monkey with the time zone, even though the dialog box that comes up when you double-click on the date in the Info window clearly implies it can be changed. I'm going to try looking at some other app that can tweak that metadata - might turn into a lot of exporting and importing though...

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Answer 6

Mick_M Author

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99 points

Jan 26, 2025 8:38 AM in response to Mick_M

Just answering my own question- it looks like I can do this by creating a smart album. I'm definitely all set now. Thanks again to everybody that helped me.

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Answer 7

léonie

Level 10

200,735 points

Jan 26, 2025 8:59 AM in response to Mick_M

So it turns out I'm all set now! Here's the solution (thanks to you guys). First off, you don't really need to change the time zone display using the terminal command, although it does help make things more obvious.

Changing the display of the date and time in the Info helps to make it easier to compare two dates in Photos, without having to open the "Adjust Date & Time" pane.

You have mentioned two problems - incorrect chronological sorting of the photos from two cameras and the display of the date using a timezone different from the local timezone where the photo has been taken.

To avoid both problems it helps to import all photos while we are still in the timezone where the pictures have been taken, if possible. I am always taking a Mac with me, when I am traveling and taking photos, particularly, when I am crossing timezones when traveling.

The Photos.app has no option to specify the timezone the photos have been taken on import. So it is making an educated guess. if the photos are tagged with GPS, Photos will assume the timezone of the date is the local timezone of the GPS location. If the photo has no GPS tag Photos will use the timezone of the system time of the Mac, when we import the photos. This can cause one photos taken in a location with a poor GPS signal to be sorted incorrectly.

If we cannot take a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with us, when we are traveling, it helps to set the timezone in the System preferences to the country where we took the photos, before we import the photos later at home. This avoids the mixture of timezones for photos and videos with and without GPS.

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Answer 8

Old Toad

Level 10

216,196 points

Jan 25, 2025 4:14 PM in response to Mick_M

You're welcome.

Have you tried the Image ➙ Adjust Date and Time… menu option. That will let you change the time zone of any picture you have selected.

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Answer 9

Jan 25, 2025 2:48 PM in response to Mick_M

Mick_M wrote: … I do a Get Info…

Do you mean "Get Info" in the Finder? Or do you mean the "Info" window in Photos? The show different things…

Photos tries to put things with the same time zone and the same time in the same place. But mixing them is very confusing. I've had to do this with family cameras all set differently, and I just messed with it until it looked right.

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Answer 10

Mick_M Author

Level 1

99 points

Jan 26, 2025 7:49 AM in response to Mick_M

Maybe not so fast... Now that I know how to change a set of photos for the right time and time zone, my next issue is how to select the ones I want to change. All the pictures were originally stored on a hard drive and subsequently imported into Photos. My wife's iPhone pictures all have file names of the form "IMG_####" and all of my pictures are "SANYO####". I have already gone through all of the pictures and named them e.g.:

Now I'm trying to somehow select all the pictures from within the China trip that contain the text SANYO. How can I do that?

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