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I want to put my photos in folders (exported from Photos to my personal folders) in an arrangement to my choosing. I can then drag and drop those photos in that arrangement into a slide show or other publishing app.
My photos are from various years and various locations and have varied metadata.
MacBook Air 11″, macOS 10.15
Group the photos in albums as you want them. If you want a specific order you can manually arrange them in the album as you'd like.
Then export the original or edited version of the photos to a folder on the Desktop. If you want to maintain the same sort order in the folder on the desktop you'll have to use one of these renaming schemes:
1 - pick File Name = Album name with number
2 - rename the files with this AppleScript, Batch Change Title to Text w/Padded Sequential Numbers , and export as File Name = Title
You'll need to do that for each album of photos you want to export as a group.
You can arrange by name, date, type - all the standard sort orders.
You cannot manually make a specific order. If you want that, then the only way to do it is by renaming. If you go that way, I'd suggest a numeric prefix - eg 0001, 0002, 0003 etc. You'd need enough leading zeros to cope with the maximum files you'll have in one folder.
Even if you could manually drag and drop into a special order it would be very fragile. If ever they were sorted by one of the standard sorts (date, name etc) - all the work you'd done manually arranging would be lost.
Mr. Toad,
You answered a question that I didn't ask probably because I didn't phrase the question well enough. I have already my photos in folders. They came to me as jpg files and I just arranged them by type. Attached is a screen shot of my photo folder with various file names, etc. I want to arrange those photos in my specific order for easy insertion into word or other apps. I'm not wanting to have to rename each photo file so that they can be alphabetically arranged. Looking for an easier way to manage the files. Perhaps there is an app I can download that might do what I'm wanting to do.
If you organise your images in the Finder, as you've done there, then you are limited to what the Finder can do. Simply it does not have the capability to "arrange those photos in your specific order" without renaming the files.
Know what does? Albums in Photos - or indeed any Photo Manager.
The best you can do to organise photos in the Finder for easy access is to structure your folders with nested subfolders. Don't put all your JPEGs into one single flat folder but create subfolders for related images in the JPEGs folder and name these subfolders in a way that allows you sort the folder in a useful way. For example, create a separate subfolder with photos of Bob, a separate subfolder for Jerry, separate sub folders for the parts of the ship, like Bow or Crew Mess. If you need the same photo in several subfolders, you could put an alias into the second folder.
To mark the important photos use the tags - the menu item "tag" in the File menu allows you to assign color labels. The photos inside a folder can be sorted by the tags as well.
For example, I am using a set of subfolders named by the camera I used to take the photos. That makes it easier to batch process the photos and tag the photos with metadata before I import them to Photos for Mac.
How can I organize my photos to my criteria?
