Organizing photos in folders oldest to newest

[Mary H]

Good morning,

I am sure I am just missing something but I am wanting to organize photos in a folder (not Photos app) from the oldest to the newest. It looks like default is newest to oldest, and I cannot figure out how to change that. I have almost 200 photos I need to organize this afternoon to make a slide show and right now I am hoping there is an easier way to sort them than doing it all manually.

Thanks,
Mary

MacBook Pro M1, Sequoia 15.6.1

 

[Ruggy]

This is files in a folder in finder where they are displayed as a list?
Just click on the heading and it reverses the order.

 

[MacBH928]

open folder -> cmd+2 (will make list view)-> go to top where it says "date created" -> if you click on it , it will organize from oldest to newest or the opposite every time you click it

 

[Bazza1]

open folder -> cmd+2 (will make list view)-> go to top where it says "date created" -> if you click on it , it will organize from oldest to newest or the opposite every time you click it

Unless I'm mistaken (hey, it happens), 'Date Created' only shows as the date a file was added to a folder, not the actual date of the photo. And that real date data may or may not be buried in the actual photo's metadata (if you can access it) or by the date you gave the actual pic.
I think you may be stuck with manual sorting...

 

[adrianlondon]

Download "exiftool": https://exiftool.org

I use this command to alter the "date modified" field to match the time photos were created (-r for subdirectories too):

exiftool '-DateTimeOriginal>FileModifyDate' -r . -ext jpeg -ext jpg

 

[Fishrrman]

I keep my photos organized this way -- INDEPENDENT FROM any image editing app (this particularly means, "Photos").

It's easy.

I just created a master folder.
Inside, I created sub folders like this:

Works for me.
As I mentioned above, I really don't use Photos much. Instead, I use apps for viewing and editing such as:
xnViewMP
Lyn
Photoscape
DXO Photolab

What I like about the above apps is they'll let you view and navigate a folder hierarchy as I created above.

Photos won't do that. It creates its own "library", and once pics are absorbed into it, they become all-but impossible to find using the finder. You CAN tell Photos to NOT import originals into its library, I think. But many (most?) folks don't use this feature.

 

[adrianlondon]

If you don't want to name your directories with dates in them, but still want them in order of the latest photo added to it, and you're comfortable with scripting in terminal, then ...

SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for d in `find -d /Users/xxxx/Pictures -type d`
do
cd "$d" && getfileinfo -m "`ls -1t | head -n 1`" > /tmp/xx && setfile -m "`cat /tmp/xx`" .
cd "$d" && getfileinfo -m "`ls -1tr | head -n 1`" > /tmp/yy && setfile -d "`cat /tmp/yy`" .
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS

This sets the created date of the folder to the oldest file or folder within it, and the modified date to the newest.

Edit the "find" command as you wish. It will do subdirectories, but you may need to run the command more than once, as "find" doesn't necessarily pick the subdirectories before parent ones, and as the run could alter the dates of a subdirectory, you may want those dates reflected in the parent.