Sorting photos in albums on Mac

Scripts have already been written.

Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related … - Apple Community

Another option for batch writing titles is to use  Photos Workbench($30)

Probably the best and easiest thing to have done would be to have just corrected the date with the menu "Image>Adjust Date and Time." When a bunch of pictures is selected, this changes them all by the same increment.

Biotech guy wrote: Wouldn't that change all the photos to the same date/time? That would not help with sorting.

No. As I said, "When a bunch of pictures is selected, this changes them all by the same increment. "

This is a quick way to fix Time Zone problems, for instance.

You should try it and see how it works.

The next time you import photos from your Canon EOS R8 set the Date & Time of your Mac to the same timezone as the camera (and don't forget to set it back, when you are done). Then the the Photos should be imported with the correct timezone right away.

if you have imported the photos with the wrong timezone and want to fix the timezone with "Image > Adjust Date and Time", you have to do it in two steps:

• First click into the map for the correct timezone strip and select the correct closest city. This will change the covert the capture date to the timezone you have selected, but not change the sorting, because it will add the timezone offset to the displayed time, the "time Adjusted". "Adjusted" and "Original" will now be different.
• Now set the "Adjusted" back to "Original". Both times should be the same, but with the correct timezone shown below the map. This will subtract the time difference that Photos added on import by assigning the wrong time zone on import.

These are the fields you have to adjust:

If the clock in your camera has been set correctly for the timezone you have set in the camera, setting the time zone in "Adjust date & Time" to the camera timezone and making "Adjusted" the same as "Original" should suffice to get the sorting correct. If the clock has been drifting a few minutes, you can correct it at the same time.

Biotech guy wrote: the best solution still seems to be using my app

You may find that you will want the dates and times corrected. If you transfer the pictures somewhere, or if you use an iPhone, the Title may not be useable for sorting, or it may disappear altogether.

I've done this with countless pictures. For instance, in Ireland before cameras even had GPS, we were taking pictures with 4 cameras with their clocks set to different times! I could separate them with a Smart Album, so I could use "Image>Adjust Date and Time" once on each group.

If you sort by time, you may be able to separate them pretty quickly. The easiest thing is to set up a Smart Album and use a keyword shortcuts to quickly go through the pictures, just tapping a single key, to identify which time zone is being used. I put a section on using Keyword Shortcuts in this:

Choosing Favorites using Keywords in Mac … - Apple Community

I'll say that, in fact, I use titles. So my picture have titles like "2025 08 13 - 123 - Cat Cafe" with date and index number allowing me to sort them by title. But I have also been using a script written by léonie to fix the dates themselves, because it's useful to have the right values.

Copying the filename to the title is a great solution to get the images sorted chronologically. I am glad it is working for you. It may not work, if you are using more than one camera from different makers, where the format of the filename differs.

Just a caution for others coming across this discussion - I recommend to make a backup copy of the Photos Library before running an Apple Script for batch changing the photos. If you are downloading a script from somewhere, it may have been written for another system version or not have been tested on your system version at all, there may be problems with the region and language settings. I don't know how good the programming skills of ChatGPT are. So test any script on a small test library before trusting it to run on your main library.