Maintain custom sort order when exporting Photos album

This happens with multiple cameras using different clocks and maybe set to different time zones-- it's a real pain. I've been going back to work on a set of pictures take in Ireland with 4 different cameras, all before cameras used GPS. The other place this is a concern is with scanned images, since the date you get is the date of the scan, not the date the picture was taken.

There are two way that I handle it. One is to use the app Photos Workbench ($30) to add titles to the pictures that include an index. I have it automatically create titles like "2025 12 01 - 001 - Trip to Japan" or something like that, with the 001 being an automatically created index that maintains whatever order of pictures you give it. In Mac Photos you can sort by title, so you never have to worry about the pictures re-arranging themselves. Titles can show underneath the pictures in Mac Photos' Thumbnail views. OF course, you don't have to use this app-- I used to do it manually. There are also scripts for this, and there are other apps. The trusted 3rd party app PowerPhotos ($40) has recently provided some powerful metadata handling.

The downside is that Titles don't work in iOS. So I also change the date and time. I use a script written by léonie, an expert here, that uses the date and time of the first of a selection of pictures to increment the time for all the rest of them, keeping them in order when sorting by date. Then the pictures stay in order in iOS, as well.

Here is a collection of scripts that she collected:

Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related … - Apple Community

I don't write scripts, myself, but the ones you find there can be very helpful. And there, under Scripting Photos>Batch Changing: Scripting Date and Time you'll find

Script: Batch Change the Date and Time to… - Apple Community

To indicate the my times are made up, I start at 1:01:01 and add 1 minute to each one.

Let us know how it goes…

Chris Hoskins wrote: …I'd set my camera and the iphone to the same times and time zone so this wouldn't happen. When I empowered it put all the phone pictures first and camera pictures second.

Different cameras and different apps handle time zones differently. Exif metadata has multiple date fields, and there's no guarantee that two cameras or two viewers will use the same field. You do your best, and then fix it later.

If you find that all the pictures from one camera are off by exactly the same amount from the other, then the best thing to do is to get one set all together (maybe using a smart album.) The select them all, and use Image>Adjust Date and Time." It will show the first one-- change it, and all the others will change by the same amount. When they're all different by the same amount, it's really easy.

When you export a picture from Photos you lose information. Photos is a non-destructive editor. If you edit or crop a picture, maybe cutting off the sides or intensifying the color, the original file is never touched. Instead, your editing steps are stored in the Photos Database. It's the same for every kind of edit, keyword, comment that you do-- the original picture is not altered, but the information is stored in the Database. So the picture you see on the screen never existed as a file-- it is constructed on the fly from the original plus the information in the database. The edited picture doesn't become  a file until you use "File>Export nn Photos" from its menu. Even then, what you get depends on the parameters you indicate-- always a fraction of all the information that's in the database. When you export a picture from Photos, you have to make lots of decisions, and so with the exported file you lose all the other options that are available within Photos.

From the database you can export a huge variety of versions of that edited picture, but here’s the thing: you can't use any one version to get all the information back.Inside Photos there is also information about faces, objects, text, etc., that won't be included in a jpg file. So a picture file has way less information than what is actually contained in Photos. Photos keeps the original so that you can always start over and make any new version you like.