Which date is used to sort photos?

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Level 1

60 points

Which date is used to sort photos?

I went on vacation and made photos with both my iPhone and Nikon camera. I imported the photos from my Nikon camera in Photos but there is something strange going on... Photos which I took at the same time both on iPhone and on my Nikon camera are not sorted well in Photos. In the inspector they have the same date and time (give or take a minute) but have other pictures in between them.

So, I have a picture from my iPhone shot on 15/9/2017 11:20:01. The there come 24 other pictures ranging from 11:21 to 14:42 (all shot on iPhone same date) then the picture from my Nikon camera is there, with the timestamp 15/9/2017 11:20:46 (a few second later).

Even if I select "sort by oldest fist" this isn't changed. Is there an other date/time Photos sorts the pictures by? Or is there a timezone thing messing with my Photos (my iPhone had automatic timezone, I didn't change anything on my Nikon).

What can I do to fix this. I do not want to sort pictures manually though.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), macOS Sierra (10.12.3)

Posted on Oct 15, 2017 2:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,071 points

Oct 18, 2017 9:58 AM in response to iAmRenzo

Did this trip take you into a different timezone?

Then check the tmezones for the photos, that are out of order, You can see the time zone at the bottom of the panel "Image > Adjust date and time".

Photos is trying to infer the proper timezone, when you import photos, because the capture date does not have a time zone assigned.

If a photo has GPS (iPhone photos), Photos may interpret the capture date relative to the GPS time zone.
If no GPS is present, Photos may use the time zone of the current system time, when you import the photos to Photos. So dates will be read differnetly, shifted by several hours, if you import photos at home or if you import them while in the correct timezone

For the photos, that are not sorted correctly, adjust the timezone to the timezone of the other photos. You can do that by changing the menu at the bottom of "Image > Adjust date and time" to another "closest city". If you switch to a different time zone, the capture date may be shifted by photos. If that happens, change the hour back.

For example: If your camera has been set to the local time of New Zealand, but you import the photos at home, and the closest city shown is your home town, change the closest city, but ensure that the two dates shown, Original and Adjusted, will remain the same:

This can be done for a batch of photos at once. You may want to split your photos into two smart albums - one album for the photos taken with the iPhone and one photo for the photos taken with your Nikon camera. This way you can select easily a range of photos to fix the time zone for all of them at once.

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Answer 2

iAmRenzo Author

Level 1

60 points

Oct 18, 2017 10:51 AM in response to léonie

Thanks!

That was what I was looking for. When the time on my dSLR was correct in the other timezone I though it adjusted correctly (but I guess it didn't or it did when the first photo was tagged with GPS or something). It is an Nikon D5300, which has awful GPS.

After the batch timezone change I noticed that some photos have to good time. And others differ an hour.

And others have the same problem as I described in the first post! Even though I changed the timezone!

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