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Reorder photos in an album

I am looking for a specific answer to sorting the photo order within an album that I create.


I know that you must physically change the date to resort the photo order within 'Library'. But after I have created a new album, and have dragged and dropped the photos into the newly created album, I would like to change the order of the photo specifically within that new album.


How can I do this without changing the date on each picture? I have seen answers that address similar questions that require renaming photos, etc. Is there a simple way to change the order of the photos within an album and maintain that order?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Dec 27, 2020 10:59 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 30, 2020 10:42 AM

Yes. However, be aware that the sorting of the photos in a Shared Album are in the order they were added to the shared album. If you select all of the photos in a regular album in your Photos library and create a Shared Album with them there's no guarantee that they will be added and uploaded in the same order that you had them. The only sure way to get the order you want is to add them individually in the order you want them to be in.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 30, 2020 10:42 AM in response to nturf

Yes. However, be aware that the sorting of the photos in a Shared Album are in the order they were added to the shared album. If you select all of the photos in a regular album in your Photos library and create a Shared Album with them there's no guarantee that they will be added and uploaded in the same order that you had them. The only sure way to get the order you want is to add them individually in the order you want them to be in.

Dec 30, 2020 1:31 AM in response to nturf

You can sort the photos in shared album, if you upgrade your Mac to macOS 11 Big Sur with Photos 6 (or use an iPhone with iOS 14 or iPad with iPadOS 14)

That is the first system version, that allows you to sort the photos in a shared album.

But it will only change how you are viewing the shared album on your device, not the shared album in iCloud. Others will still be seeing the shared album as you shared it originally. But anyone with iOS 14 or macOS 11 can now sort the shared album on their device, so there is no point in trying to sort the album before sharing the photos.

The good news is, that we now can be sure, that the capture dates will now be preserved, when we are sharing photos in a shared album, otherwise the sorting by date would not make much sense.


Shared albums can be sorted by the "Date Added" or by the "Date Taken".


Dec 30, 2020 10:38 AM in response to léonie

OK. That looks like one way of sorting a shared album. But it still falls short of 'drag and drop' sorting. Is 'drag and drop' sorting at all supported for a shared album? If not, then can I create a normal/regular type album, and then make it a shared album and still maintain the order of the normal/regular album I created?

Dec 30, 2020 10:47 AM in response to nturf

You cannot manually arrange a shared album by dragging the photos around. And it is still not possible to share a sorted standard album and keep the sort order of the standard album in the shared version. As soon as you share several photos at once, you will get random results for the sort order in the shared album. You would have to share each photo individually, exactly in the order you want to share them. That would be very tedious. I have done that for a much smaller album of a hundred photos and it took hours, primarily, because I had to add the comment for each photo when I shared it. Adding comments later would again rearrange them on the web page.


Reorder photos in an album

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