how do i sort albums by date in the new photos app?

You can't sort albums by date, only by name or manually.

If you prefix the album name with a date, the sorting by name will take care of that, for example, name the albums like "2015 -04-Birthday" or similar.

this is ridiculous! I have over 300 albums imported from iPhoto, surely Apple doesn't expect me to manually rename every one. This app is a big improvement, but because of this one missing feature it is unusable to me. Even worse, because they have now pulled the 9.6.1 iPhoto update, I can't even carry on using that 😠

Tell Apple what additional features you want in Photos via both http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html and http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html since they don't have a feedback page for Photos as yet.

I have to agree with Dalek2000, this is absolutely ridiculous. There is simply no point in importing iPhoto events into the Photos app, if the orignal sorting gets lost.

Until Apple fixes that (I don't think it is a missing feature, it is a bug - Photos is presented to us as an iPhoto replacement) I have no choice but to continue using iPhotos. Fortunately, I have all my photos in folders, so if iPhoto stops working one day, it is not a big deal. Maybe then I will explore the options in Photoshop Elements...

You can re-install the 9.6.1 update, it's in the "purchased" are of the Mac App Store, and you can always re-install iPhoto.

That said... Over 300 iPhoto albums. It may be worth experimenting a bit with Photos built in functionality. It's quite likely there are better ways to organize your photos and get to the photos you want more quickly than having hundreds of albums.

You can re-install the 9.6.1 update, it's in the "purchased" are of the Mac App Store, and you can always re-install iPhoto.

Since the release of 10.10.3 and Photos iPhoto 9.6.1 is no longer available at the App Store. A user posted that when they talked to Customer Support he was told that it would be made available sometime soon. We'll just have to wait and see.

I just went through the situation of not finding iPhoto 9.6.1 in the App Store. Working with Applecare, the solution was to (a) delete the iPhoto app, (b) restart my iMac, (c) go to the App store and click on Purchases, and (d) reinstall iPhoto. In my case, for some reason, iPhoto was hidden from my purchases. Go to Store > View My Account, and go to Manage for Hidden Purchases, where you can unhide iPhoto. Once I did that, things seemed to work okay.

cheers for that Tom, I've just managed to get iPhoto back thanks to your advise.

As William Lloyd says though, i would much prefer to use the new app if possible as iPhoto is quite sluggish with a library that large. Lets hope its just an oversight that's fixed soon.

I think it depends on what you use the application for. For the casual iPhone snapshooter, it is probably a great tool.

However I use a DSLR. I do not have it always with me, I carry it with me to certain "events" (a family reunion, a weekend trip, a summer vacation). I take a lot of pictures at one event, throw most of them away, and process the rest. All of that I do in Adobe Lightroom. iPhoto for me is just a nice tool for viewing and presenting the results, not more.

Even worse, I might have overlapping Events, e.g. a collection of pictures of my kids taken during summer, and another collection taken at a specific event, say, a birthday party. So the timeline does not work for me at all.

With iPhoto I could sort all these collections by date and it was very easy to find them. Now I have to sort them manually, or rename them from

"My grandmother celebrates her 95th birthday" to "2015-2-6 - My grandmother celebrates her 95th birthday"? Hm.

This was enormously helpful to me. I am stunned by the missing features in Photos and was thinking of maybe jumping off a bridge if I couldn't get back to iPhoto. Photos is clearly geared toward the casual user who wants to share selfies. I have 28,000 photos in one of my libraries, and many have required heavy duty editing for the purpose of publishing...and lots of other things that Photos doesn't offer. Now I seem to have iPhoto back again, and I'll use it long enough to learn some new software and make a transition to it. Thank you, Tom!
P.S. I did lose my keyword file, bummer, but not so bad as losing iPhoto entirely.

P.S. I did lose my keyword file, bummer, but not so bad as losing iPhoto entirely.

Here's how to preserve your keywords in the future. Select a photo to be used as a "mule" for your keywords and add every keyword to it. When the library is merged, converted to another version that mule will carry over all your keywords.

You can also export the mule file as jpeg with the two checkboxes checked in the Export window so you'll have an external copy of the file with all of the keywords embedded in it.

That is helpful indeed to know, Old Toad. Every time I start a new library, and I often do when traveling, my keywords get messed up in one way or another. I will follow your advice in future. I like the .jpeg idea.