A common question people have about using Mac Photos is how do you sort the photos in
different ways.
For instance, here I am looking at my photo collection by selecting Photos under Library.
So it's going to show me a list of all my photos.
Here at the top you can see Photos is selected instead of Moments, Collections, and Years.
Now here I'm going to see a list of all my Photos sorted by the time they were added.
As a matter of fact if I go to View, Sort I can see it says Keep Sorted By Oldest Capture
Date.
So that's all I've got.
I don't have any other option here.
You can see it's grayed out.
Sometimes people say well why isn't it letting me sort in another way like reverse that or
something.
When you switch to Moments, Collections, and Years you can't change the sort either.
Which makes sense because, you know, you're saying look at it by years and showing you
by years, sorting it in another way wouldn't make sense.
It wouldn't be years anymore.
Collections is just zooming in on that and Moments is zooming in on that further.
Photos is kind of like a raw view.
You're main view of all of your photos in your Library and it's not really customizable.
It is what it is.
So how can you, if you really want to, sort your photos in a different way.
Well you can sort an Album anyway you want.
So if I go an album like vacation here I can go to View and Sort.
You can see now I can Sort by Title, I can Sort by Oldest First or Newest First.
So I get these options when I look at an album.
The solution is to simply create an album that has all you photos.
You could go and create a new album, File, New Album, drag all of your photos in there
and sort them.
But then new photos that you add wouldn't be automatically be added to that album.
So the smart thing to do would be to create a Smart Album and do that in such a way, I'll
call it All Photos, that every photo you've got is in there.
So you can do it lots of ways.
Like, for instance, you could say Date Added is after, and then a date way in the past.
Or one way I like to do it is, Photo Is, and then you can say there's hidden here.
You can change it to Is Not.
So photo is not hidden because you wouldn't want a hidden photo if you hid it for some
reason to show up here.
So Photo Is Not Hidden.
In other words all my photos that I want visible are going to be in All Photos.
Since this is a Smart Album as I update my Library this album will also update to include
all my photos that are not hidden.
Now that I have this list here I can go to View, Sort and Sort By Title, Oldest, or Newest.
Just remember that that's there in My Albums and to go to it whenever I want to sort in
a different way.
Now a related subject is sorting the albums themselves.
Look here in the left sidebar and you see these albums here.
They're not in alphabetical order and they are not necessarily in date order so how can
I sort these?
Well, this is actually pretty easy if you know the trick.
The first thing you want to do is you want to click on the main My Albums here.
Now you have a view of all your albums here on the left.
Let's enlarge that a little bit here so we can see them.
The order they appear here is the same order they appear here.
Sure enough you can go and Sort.
So I can Sort By Name and you can see it resorts these by name order and you can see the change
is reflected here in the left sidebar.
I can also Sort Oldest First, Newest First, etc.
It's going to take the date of the oldest photo in the album, for instance, and use
that to sort them.
So I can do it like that.
I can also drag and drop here on the left to change the order and you can see it will
change the order there.
I can do that same thing here.
So once I do that now I'm manually sorting.
If I want to force them to sort again by oldest first I have to select that.
So you can sort your albums in the left sidebar just by going to My Albums and then using
this interface here or the View, Sort to sort them.