Importing photos from Documents folder into Photos without sorting by date added

The Photos.app is handling the filenames differently from the titles. We can sort the photos by the title but not by the filename, so we have to copy the filenames to the title, if we want to sort by the filenames.

Photos 4 on Mojave has been the only version of Photos that would use the filenames as a default title when sorting photos by the title. The upgrade to Photos 5 killed this nice feature.

It is one of the reasons why kept two of my older Macs on macOS 10.14 Mojave, because the Photos.app on that version has been the best version so far and also can still handle some older video codecs.

And the upgrade to macOS 15 Sequoia has changed, how Photos is handling the date of an album, when sorting the list of albums by date.

• In the previous versions of Photos the date of an album has been the capture date of the newest phot in the album, and sorting the list of folders and albums by date would sort by the this capture date.
• In Photos on macOS 15 the date of an album is the modification date of the album. When sorting the albums by date, the list of albums will continually change, whenever we modify an album. It is like herding cats, because the albums will not stay but, when we add an item to the album.

After they have been imported and not renamed previously you can use these Apple Scripts:

Batch Change Title to Text w/Padded Sequential Numbers

Batch Change Title to Capture Date-Description-Padded Sequential Numbers

to retitle them and then when exported use the Title as the new file name.

mlb414 wrote: … I have a folder of photos in documents in a specific order I want to import to PHOTOS to make a slide show. I check the box at the top on the review import that says KEEP IN FILE order

I don't think that I have ever seen "KEEP IN FILE order" in Photos. Are you thinking about another app?

Photos does have as part of the Import routine the option to "Keep Folder Organization"

which puts pictures that were in the same Finder folder into the same Photos Album, but the order they appear in the album depends on the sort order you choose in the album.

Once the pictures are in an album in Photos, you can move them around into any order you like. For me, once I get them into an order I like, I use the 3rd party app Photos Workbench($30) to add title that include an index to preserve the order.

I sometimes do the same thing to picture files before I import them to Photos. I use the 3rd party app GraphicConverter ($40) to add an index to the filename. There are other cheaper and more limited apps to change filenames.

If you're making a slideshow project, then you can re-arrange pictures in the slideshow, itself.

To select music to a slideshow from your music library you have to use a slideshow project.

Once you have a slideshow project you can click the Music button (the blue note) in the right sidebar and select your Music Library as the source of the sound track. Use the search field to find the songs you want to use.

You can delete the them song from the field "Selected Music", just select the song and press the delete key ⌫ .

Old Toad wrote: …You'll need to rename them with an app like Name Mangler . You can rename them with the same name followed by a sequential number

mlb414, That's great-- but do this ONLY IN FINDER, before pictures are imported--- don't try messing with the names of files after they've been imported to Photos!

Photos has its own system, and changing the files without using the Photos app (or a few apps that use the Photos routines) can corrupt the database. That would be bad. "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." "Right. That's bad."

I think that the misunderstanding here is in concentrating on the filenames. Photos, unlike Finder (or Explorer) is an Image Management System, so filenames have essentially no purpose in dealing with images. Almost none of the images in my Photos Library are even contained in files at all, so filenames are worthless-- they are provided as reference to original files, but not really used.

A File Management system like Finder relies on filenames, file created date, file modified dates, file extensions, and so on. In Finder you can sort files in folders using those things, for instance, rather than content, because the content in different files is so different. None of that is useful in Image Management. Pictures have similar content, and so their management depends on Capture Dates, Titles, Captions, Faces, Keywords, Objects, Locations, text, and things that are parts of pictures but that aren't in files at all-- and there are lots of organizing options in Photos using those image attributes. Since pictures aren't necessarily in files, then sorting pictures by file date or file name doesn't make sense.

Since we usually start with files, we have ways of converting some file information into Titles, for instance. That's what Old Toad and I offered you.

As far as sorting albums in folders, like léonie discussed, I either use names (where the date may be included,) or I just drag them around. I do wish I could sort by name backwards, though.

You'll need to rename them with an app like Name Mangler . You can rename them with the same name followed by a sequential number like this: