Sorting the Photos library by Date+Title

You don't get heirarchical sorting in Photos, but I use  Photos Workbench($30) to add titles, and I sort by title. You can make formats like

with choices like

You can also do a find and replace for titles, which I use to fix my mistakes.

I also use scripts from here:

Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related … - Apple Community

that have been written by people on this forum. For instance, I put pictures from a certain date in the custom order I want, and then I use a script to increment their times by a few seconds so they will stay that way when I sort by time and date.

What do you think?

PS: Since she popped in ahead of me, I'll say that the time script I use is written by léonie.

The Photos.app can sort by the title, but not by the filename.

If the "title with the number" is the filename, you have to copy and paste it to the title field to be able to sort by this title.The more recent versions of photos are showing the filename below the thumb name of a photo, if the photo has no title the filename is shown dimmed in gray. When you copy the filename in the Info of the photo to the title field, the title will no longer be dimmed and you can sort the photos by the title, when you view an album.

it would help, if you create an album for each film roll.

There are a number of user offered Apple Scripts that can add the file name to the title, the capture date what's already in the title or that you want in the title followed by a padded sequential number. The can be found at this user tip: Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related User Tips.

A few are:

• Batch Change Title to Capture Date-Description-Padded Sequential Numbers
• Batch Change the Title of selected Photos to the Description/Caption - Apple Community
• Batch Change Title to Capture Date-Location-Description-Padded Sequential Number
• Batch Change Title to Text w/Padded Sequential Numbers

Then you can sort the photos by title. However, the date format must be year-month-day for the sort to work as you'd like, i.e. 2025-07-18.

Another thing: I compile the script as an application, select the photos in the order I want and launch the app. This screenshot shows the sorting options for the various areas in a Photos Library: