Photos out of chronological order in albums

I could care less about time zones. The frustrating problem is that when a slide show is created, slides are put in order desired, and "Photos" then changes that order. Surely a user selected ordering of photos should take precedence over any metadata included with the photo. Come on....

yup, it is the pain in the rear end, that such simple feature like sorting the pictures by (in PHOTOS folder) date taken should be available on the iMac.

This create a huge problems when you travel and use the multipule devices to take the pictures. For instance camera with no bluetooth/GPS & the iPhone. The iPhone pictures will be quickly moved via iCloude to my iMac, but the camera pictures need to be transferred manually later on-pulling the card out, copying to your hard drive, etc. This is when the problem starts. Does anyone have any clue how to resolve this issue?

I recently upgraded to macOS Sierra 10.12.3 and having just opened Photos I find that the sets of pictures I've uploaded over the years, which used to be there in upload date order, are now all mixed up - so that a set from 2015 may be followed by a set from 2008, a set from 2013 by a set from 2010, and so on. How do I reorganise my library so that I get back to a proper sequence, where the oldest uploaded set comes first and the most recent one comes last?

Rants are useless and of no value to you or anyone else and are against the TOU you agreed to - and of course it would be much smarter to learn how the software works - the system albums each have a specific sort for a specific reason and users you understand how to use the program can easily make their own albums and sort them how ever they want

If you actually want to learn something ask a sane question

LN

It's a reflection of the frustration I feel in uploading photos to a folder to find them out of order. It's completely absurd for Apple to not simply put a "sort by" button on the folder, if I have a problem you can gurantee hundreds of thousands of others are having the same problem and it extremely perplexing to me that Apple do not fix this. For example I have just uploaded the photos into a Google folder and they have all gone up in the correct order and whats more I can rearrange them to suit myself. If you only ever use Apple you might not realise how pig-headed they are about a lot of things that those of us who have - mostly - migrated over from Android find annoying. I want the photos in an apple folder because it is easier for themto share through a friends Apple TV when I go over so would prefer to use Apple folders.

Again you should actually learn how to use the software - no wonder you are frustrated -

In Photos you can not have folders of photos and folders only contain albums or other folders and since there are not any photos in folders you of course and not sort photos within a folder

Try taking time to learn how to use the software and you will stop being frustrated

LN

The way I feel is I've wasted and hour and half on this already so I will stick to my perfectly good google photo album and put it down to one of those peculiar Apple things. I'm not especially techie - though I'm not a complete dolt - and I don't want to spend yet more time trying to figure out something that should be completely intuitive. Why Apple would assign photos randomly into a folder is completely beyond me, and I dare say beyond the vast majority of people.

Anyway thanks for your input 🙂

I had a similar complaint but according to the Apple priesthood we're all just doing it wrong. According to the Book of Steve there are sound scriptural reasons for Apple for randomly scrambling photos in their albums as part of some higher mystical purpose.

In regular (non-"smart") albums, use View > Keep Sorted By Date to have the pictures displayed in "date-taken" order. Smart albums should already be displayed in that order.

Given your description of being unable to drag pictures into a different order suggests that you have "Keep Sorted" checked or defaulted, so your pictures should already be displayed in the order Photos thinks they were taken.

We are told that the version of Photos in OS X El Capitan (10.11), available in the fall, will have more sorting options. However, I'm wondering if your problem might be with how Photos is detecting the date taken.

my photos appear out of chronological order after import into albums.

Just to be sure, what do you mean by "Import into albums"? You cannot import directly into albums, but import into the library, and the photos will be automatically split into moments. The moments appear chronologically in the Photos view. When you create albums and add imported photos to albums, the albums can be arranged manually by dragging or are arranged by capture date.

This did not happen in iPhoto and no times/dates were altered from the original. This seems such a basic thing. Anyone know how to fix this?

If you are viewing regular albums and the photos are still sorted incorrectly, than check if your photos have been taken with different time zone settings. When you import photos to Photos the timezone of your current system time will be used, which may be different from the timezone the camera has been set to. Photos that you do not import while still being in the same time zone will have an incorrect time stamp. And photos has a bug that makes it ignore time zone corrections applied in iPhoto or Aperture.

léonie wrote:

If you are viewing regular albums and the photos are still sorted incorrectly, than check if your photos have been taken with different time zone settings. When you import photos to Photos the timezone of your current system time will be used, which may be different from the timezone the camera has been set to. Photos that you do not import while still being in the same time zone will have an incorrect time stamp. And photos has a bug that makes it ignore time zone corrections applied in iPhoto or Aperture.

There is no provision in the Exif standard to store the timezone in the file's metadata -- for example, the "DateTimeOriginal" metadata tag is stored formatted as a 20 byte, null terminated "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS" character string. There is a provision to store the date (but not the time) relative to UTC in the "GPSDateStamp" metadata tag but unless the camera is GPS enabled & receiving GPS location info, this tag won't be included in the file & there will be no way for Photos (or any other app) to determine the timezone of the location where the photo was taken from its embedded metadata.

When or where you import a photo has no effect on this -- the Exif metadata is written to the photo file by the camera, so unless you change or add to it after import, that is what will be used to determine the date, time, & (if included) GPS location. Moreover, since the GPS date stamp does not include any time of day info, any timezone correction based on that will require an external lookup function to check the location's local time relative to UTC.

IOW, the timezone is meaningless unless the location is known. All Exif date-time metadata is "camera-local," so to speak, & there is nothing Photos or any other app that relies on Exif metadata for that can do about that, other than provide a way to change it. However, since a timezone is inherently a function of a location, in effect it doesn't matter which one you change, which is why the Photos "Adjust Date & Time" option lets you set either the date & time directly or by clicking on a timezone on the world map display.

So basically, since there actually is no timezone in an Exif date-time stamp, it cannot have an incorrect one. It is just a property derived from local camera time & location -- if either one is wrong, the displayed timezone won't be correct, period.

I know that, R C-R. The missing time zone in the EXIF has been the biggest problem for me, since i started with digital photography, and the better time zone handling was the main reason for me to switch from iPhoto to Aperture.

The bug I am referring to does not apply to the EXIF in imported images, but the time zone data for image versions in photo libraries. Photos migrates the time zone data in Aperture libraries and iPhoto libraries incorrectly. And Photos even displays the time zones incorrectly, when a timezone is specified in Photos using the Adjust Date and Time command.

Apple's photo library application manage time zones, when we specify the time zone on import, but this is broken in Photos. All edited image versions in my iPhoto Libraries and Aperture libraries have time zones assigned to the versions, and the time zones are shown correctly together with the dates in the info panels in both applications.

But when Photos migrated the libraries it ignored the time zone settings that are stored in the original libraries.

And now the sorting of photos taken with my iPhone and the Lumix cameras is a mess.

For example, in my original Aperture library are photos taken with my iPad and with my Lumix camera. My iPad will usually be set to the local time zone and the Lumix cameras are always set to UTC. When importing I specify in Aperture that the correct time zone for the Lumix cameras is UTC and for the iPad for example GMT-8 for Anchorage.

For example, Aperture will show the date and time correctly for two photos taken at the same time - 11:00 UTC for the Lumix photos and 03:00 GMT-8 for the iPad photos and sort the photos side-by-side. When I open the library in iPhoto, the dates and times are also shown correctly. But the migrated library in Photos shows the two photos eight hours apart. The times are shown as 11:00 GMT+2 for the Lumix and 03:00 GMT+2 for the iPad photos. Photos simply ignores the time zone data in the libraries it migrates and uses the current system time zone name, when it displays the times. The times in all photo libraries I migrated are now a messed the photos from different cameras are no longer correctly sorted.

IOW, the timezone is meaningless unless the location is known. All Exif date-time metadata is "camera-local,"

It is meaningless only for EXIF tags. EXIF tag capture date format is ridiculous, because it does not contain the time zone. That is why Aperture makes it possible to add the timezone when photos are imported. And Photos is also allowing to set the time zone. It is silly to specify times without the time zone as part of the time.

And the time zone should not be derived from the location.

That is exactly what is causing the problems when importing photos a day later, after we are in a different state.

léonie wrote:

And the time zone should not be derived from the location.

But it must be. Timezones are defined by the geopolitical regions in which they are in effect. They are not even necessarily constant throughout the year or from one year to the next. They are just standard times established by convention & legislation, used only because it is convenient for the clock time-of-day in different parts of the world to refer to approximately the same time-of-day relative to the sun's position in the sky.

There is no getting around this. A timezone is literally a property of a location, one that is of necessity derived from both local place & time referents.

As for what happens during migration, I don't have Aperture but when I migrate iPhoto libraries I do not see any problems like you describe. If I change the Exif time stamp in iPhoto, it is not ignored by Photos. I'm also not sure what you mean about timezone settings stored in original libraries. AFAIK, there are none, just the Exif time stamps stored in the files themselves. Do you have any idea where I might look for these settings?

But it must be. Timezones are defined by the geopolitical regions in which they are in effect.

But that does not necessarily imply that all devices are recording the times according to the time zone the devices are currently in. Why should they?

The time zone in combination with a time value is just a unit of measure for the measured value.

When I am taking part in a scientific experiment, all equipment will measure the time in UTC, independent of the current location. That will provide a universal time scale for all equipment and all collected data. So it is second nature to me to keep all cameras on UTC and never, ever to change the setting of the internal clocks. So never need to worry to remember to change the clocks in the cameras when traveling. I know exactly which timezone they are set to, when I import photos from them. It makes live much easier when popping in and out between time zones like recently when we were traveling along the border between Alaska and Yukon. It was hard enough to make sure to download the iPad photos before the iPad clock changed, when ever we crossed the border again.

léonie wrote:

I know exactly which timezone they are set to, when I import photos from them.

UTC is not a timezone. And without an external reference to local timezones, including to daylight /summertime changes & the dates they are in effect for that particular year, you would not know which timezone UTC relates to. That's why scientific measurements so often use UTC -- it eliminates both the physical & historic location dependency inherent in timezones.

But while that is useful for scientists, for most users (including most amateur & professional photographers) the local time is usually much more useful. After all, how many people really want to have to convert everything from UTC to local time to tell if a photo was taken in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evening, or at any other time of day?

Maybe more to the point, the manual for every non-GPS enabled camera I have ever owned suggests setting it to local time. Some have various ways of saving a 'home time zone' setting, but that is just to make it easy to switch back to it after a trip to some place that uses a different timezone.

So if you want to keep everything on UTC & do the conversions yourself or with the help of some external reference, more power to you. It is just that most people do not, & that is what most cameras & apps like Photos are intended for.