Picture order is totally messed up

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Level 1

4 points

Picture order is totally messed up

Hi,

I just imported my 1000+ pictures from my vacation into Photos. There's many because I usually make the same shot several times to increase the chance that at least one will be good, planning on cleaning up the others on the computer when I get home.

However, in the Photos album I've created, sequences of pictures that were taken mere seconds apart are often broken, with different instances of a shot separated by several rows of pictures.

For instance, if we consider two pictures:

File 1:

Filename: DSC00935.JPG

Date: 24 May 2015 16:21

File 2:

Filename: DSC00936.JPG

Date: 24 May 2015 16:21

These two files are separated by about 40 other pictures! For some reason, the first one has been moved next to pictures taken at 14:31.

There's really a lot of such order problems, making the sorting of these pictures very cumbersome... However, the order is not completely random, only single pictures seem to have been misplaced. Needless to say, I haven't been messing around with the files or dates. What I've done is copy the files onto my hard drive using the Finder, and then import them into Photos. They have not been copied into the Photos library itself.

Does anyone have a suggestion to fix this?

Thanks!

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jun 10, 2015 4:03 PM

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Answer 1

R C-R

Level 6

17,820 points

Jun 10, 2015 4:32 PM in response to pagød

pagød wrote:

What I've done is copy the files onto my hard drive using the Finder, and then import them into Photos. They have not been copied into the Photos library itself.

If you are talking about the "All Photos" album, it displays items by the date & time they were imported into Photos, not by date & time taken. So if you copy the files to your hard drive & then import them into Photos, in that view that is the order you will see them.

Try using the "Photos" Year/Collections/Moments views, which display items by the date taken. Are they still out of order there?

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

202,025 points

Jun 13, 2015 8:00 AM in response to tomasgreen

Photos's timezone handling is broken. It is worse, when the pictures have been taken with two cameras and different timezone settings and the library is migrated from Aperture.

When importing to Aperture I could tell the application the timezone the camera has been set to. All my cameras are set to UTC to have a consistent timebase across all photos, independent of where I am and independent of any daylight saving time nonsense.

Only the dates and times of photos taken with the iPad or iPhone are set to the timezone, where the photos have been taken. Aperture respected the timezones settings on import and all photos were sorted correctly, independent of the camera. Photos is ignoring the timezones that have been set in Aperture and so the iPhone photos and the photos taken with my other cameras are no longer sorted correctly. And the dates and times will be displayed with the timezone suffix of the current system time, independent of the timezone the photos has been taken or the camera been set to.

For example: this photo has been taken in Alaska, with the camera set to UTC, and the time is correct in UTC; but Photos displays the time as GMT+02, because my system time is set to GMT+02.

When I change the system time, Photos will show the same date and time for the Photo, but with the timezone suffix of the new timezone, without converting the timestamp correctly.

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Answer 3

R C-R

Level 6

17,820 points

Jun 13, 2015 3:57 AM in response to tomasgreen

tomasgreen wrote:

Apple, listen up!

These are user-to-ussr forums, so you are talking to other users like yourself here, not to Apple.

To tell Apple about what you have found, you should use the form at https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html.

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Answer 4

pagød Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 10, 2015 8:45 PM in response to R C-R

I was seeing them in the specific album I created. I've checked the "All Photos" album and they seem to be in the right order there, but in the "Photos" collection (I guess that's the Moments view), they are in the wrong order again.

To import the pictures I've simply dragged the whole lot from the Finder into Photos, so it shouldn't have changed the order either. It's weird they don't have different sorting options, e.g. by date taken or file name.

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Answer 5

pagød Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 11, 2015 5:35 AM in response to pagød

Maybe a bit off-topic, but that reminds me of a time not so long ago when Messages was making a mess of message order in conversations that were being loaded off-beat. Seems like the ordering problem is really far-reaching!

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Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

202,025 points

Jun 11, 2015 6:39 AM in response to pagød

For instance, if we consider two pictures:

File 1:

Filename: DSC00935.JPG

Date: 24 May 2015 16:21

File 2:

Filename: DSC00936.JPG

Date: 24 May 2015 16:21

The dates you are showing are the file creation dates, right, or are you showing the dates and times as Photos is showing them?

Photos is sorting the photos in the "Moments" view by the capture date of the photos, not by the file creation date.

The "All Photos"album is sorted by the date, when the photo has been imported. So the sort order in both views may differ. This is a feature and not a bug. The capture dates may differ by seconds, but you cannot see this in Photos, because it unfortunately is showing only the minutes and not the seconds.

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Answer 7

pagød Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 11, 2015 7:01 AM in response to léonie

The information I wrote was the one that is displayed within Photos (in the information floating pane). It is true that it doesn't show seconds, however the offsets for the misplaced pictures are minutes to hours (i.e. the pictures are surrounded with other photos taken hours before), not mere seconds, so the problem doesn't seem to have something to do with granularity. Also, this information is perfectly consistent with what appears in the Finder (Created Date, Modified Date). From what I've seen, the creation date of a file is always consistent with the capture time as set by the camera.

The only reason I could think of for the order problem would be that, while importing the 1000+ pictures in one big batch, the files were not imported exactly in the Finder order (due to some disk access delay or whatever), leading to the import order differing from the Finder/creation order. However, this isn't consistent with the statement that the display order in "All photos" is by import time as compared to capture time for Moments, because "All photos" is the only place where the pictures are actually properly ordered by capture date, and in Moments and the specific vacation album they are shown in the wrong order (i.e. not capture time).

Note that the problem exists independently of whether I select "Keep Sorted by Date" in the View menu or not.

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Answer 8

Jun 13, 2015 3:24 AM in response to pagød

Apple, listen up!

I finally found the problem and it's definitely a bug. 🙂

I have a few thousand photos from a holiday in Australia snapped with my old iPhone 4s. All the dates are correct, create/modified and exif dates along with the file name (set to creation date). As you might've guessed most of the photos were randomly scattered throughout the the moments...

Anyway, I noticed that the Photos app couldn't set a timezone in "Adjust date and time" even though it had a GPS location and all the date-info you could want. So once again I dug into the exif data and noticed that the gps "Time Stamp" was set to the time of creation (minus 10 hours from GMT), but the GPS "Date Stamp" was empty. So I removed the GPS "Time Stamp" value from the exif-data, saved the photos, reset the modified date and imported the photos, and it worked!

I hope this helped, if not I guess there's still a bug out there to be found...

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Answer 9

pagød Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 14, 2015 8:51 PM in response to léonie

I've actually found the problem, and in this case it's not (really) Photos that is broken, it's actually my camera (so to say).

The problem does come from the GPS data. I've (only just) noticed that the files that are misplaced don't have GPS info (I assume the GPS wasn't ready when I shot them). So when I shoot 3 photos in a row, the first one may not have GPS coordinates, but my camera has still adjusted itself to the timezone where I am, so the timestamp of the first picture is "correct" (for the current timezone) and the same as the next two pictures, but since the first picture doesn't have GPS information, Photos assumes that it's local time, and therefore offsets it in the roll, thinking that it's been taken hours earlier or later, while the other two pictures have their shooting time offset for the shooting timezone.

So all in all, it seems that (in this respect at least) Photos is not messing up picture order, it's just not clear how the pictures are ordered. Also, it definitely doesn't try to be clever to "fix" the timezone of GPS-less pictures that are imported together with GPS'ed pictures. I guess there could be a function to fix that (set timezone based on next picture).

I wasn't aware that there's a "GPS timestamp" EXIF field -- I've looked at the EXIF info for pictures from my camera (Sony HX-50V) and there doesn't seem to be one. The timestamp is "zoneless", but the camera updates its internal clock to the current timezone.

Thanks for your replies, they did help me!

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Answer 10

R C-R

Level 6

17,820 points

Jun 15, 2015 3:03 AM in response to pagød

pagød wrote:

I wasn't aware that there's a "GPS timestamp" EXIF field ...

That field does exist. You might not see it because the metadata in the Exif file format is organized into different Image File Directories (IFDs) within the image file. The "Exif IFD" directory contains metadata tags related to the generation of the image (like in this list) while the "GPS IFD" directory contains ones related to the location where that occurred.

Typically, in apps that display Exif info the "IFD" part of the directory name is not shown, so it looks like "Exif" & "GPS" are two different things, not part of the same Exif standard.

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Answer 11

arielge

Level 1

8 points

Jun 10, 2015 10:38 PM in response to pagød

I have the exact same problem.

In the "All Photos" album everything is in the right order, but in the regular Year/Collections/Moments view, some of the newly imported photos are randomly misplaced.

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Answer 12

Jun 13, 2015 4:12 AM in response to R C-R

I realize that and I have submitted a bug-report.

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Answer 13

Hetf

Level 1

0 points

Aug 20, 2015 4:35 AM in response to pagød

Answer to wrong thread

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