How to change the order of photos at Google Photos

Introduction

Photos are sorted in the Photos tab according to "Date taken" (when available).  In albums you can sort by :

• "Oldest first" for example to tell a story, for events, holiday photos etc

• "Newest first" for example for sharing family photos: they see the newly added first

• "Recently added", for example useful to remove wrongly added photos

• Dragging photos in the order you want. This order gets however lost when an album is downloaded or shared, and the invitee adds the photos to a new album.  

There are mainly two reasons to change the order of photos:

• To tell a story in an album. 

• To correct for errors, mainly when photos from different cameras and camera types are used. The time setting in a camera may be wrong. An additional problem is that Google Photos takes the Time zone into account for sorting. 

 I still use to drag photos in the order I want in Picasa on a computer (having a backup on a computer and at least one more place is a good idea), and rename them in batch with Name-001, Name-002 etc (see further). In Picasa Web Albums we could sort by file name, but Google Photos does not support sorting by file name in an album. That would be a minor change with a big advantage for what they call a minority ("most users don't need this"). 
What remains is:

• Manual dragging photos in an album, but the order is lost when an album is downloaded, or photos saved (in an album) to another account.  It also does not correct a wrong  order in the Photos tab.

• Change date/time in Google Photos, but the order gets still lost when photos are downloaded.

• Change date/time of a photo before uploading, but that may turn out to be insufficient since Google Photos takes also the time zone into account. See further.

Measures you can take before uploading

Drag photos in the order you want, and change the filename

Although Google Photos does NOT support sorting by file name, changing the file name as shown below preserves the order when someone downloads the album.  There are many tools to rename multiple photos in batch, but you need to be able to get them first in the order you want, for example by drag & drop.  

You can use for example:

• • Picasa rename option (F2)
    Remark: Picasa is no longer supported, but can still be downloaded and installed. Recommended when you still use it or even used it in the past and reinstall.  See here.
    In Picasa you can 

    • Drag & drop one or more selected photos to another position.

    • Select all photos (or none, which also selects all).  You can also select subgroups, but then you will have to choose names that preserve the correct order. 

    • Click F2  or  File > Rename

    • Enter a name followed by -001. When you add photos to an album where the last photo is NAME-050 then you can enter NAME-051.  All photos will be renamed NAME-001 NAME-002 etc 

  • Picasa Export function
    When exporting photos there is an option to "add numbers to file name to preserve order".
    It adds 01-  02-  or -001  -002 (if >99) at the beginning of the actual filename.
    Works fine for finished albums, but not for albums where photos are added later. I prefer F2. 

  • Other programs which can be used to rename multiple files (there are probably more) 

    • Faststone Image Viewer can drag & drop followed by rename. 

    • Irfanview (PC only):

      1. Open one photo in a folder

      2. Click T to see the thumbnails of all photos in the folder

      3. Drag the photos in the order you want

      4. Select all photos (Ctrl+A) 

      5. Type B to start Batch dialog for the selected files, or directly hit  F2 > Batch rename

That would be all you need to do, if the Google Photos team did not obstinately refuse to implement sorting by file name.  For mobile phone users, adding a renaming tool (to be used after drag & drop) would make it even better. 

Change date/time (DateTimeOriginal)

To change date/time you can for example use :

• • Picasa

    • Select one or more photos 

    • Click Tools > Adjust Date and Time

    • Fill in a new photo date

    • Choose "Adjust all photos dates by the amount" or "Set all photos to the same date and time"

    • Click OK

Warning:  

• • • changing date/time in Picasa seems to set the  time zone at GMT+00, which may again lead to incorrect sorting in Google Photos. You can avoid this by adding the same amount (for example 1 second or 1 minute) to ALL photos in an album.

    • However, when photos from other sources are added to the same album, or when you uploaded part of your holiday photos in another zone, and the rest at home,  you may still have problems, since these photos may get another time zone, and Google Photos sorts taking into account the timezone for sorting. You may have to:

      1. Correct the timezone for the photos uploaded from Picasa in Google Photos. That is easier when you add them to a separate album, to do it in batch. 

      2. But when changing the timezone it also automatically changes the time so that the order remains unchanged! You thus have to give the selected photos again the original time. 

      3. This user uploaded via VPN to get the time zone correct: https://support.google.com/photos/thread/240531433/google-photos-wrong-timezone
         
         

  • Irfanview (only available for Windows)
    Can be used for giving all selected photos the same date/time, adjust the time of all selected photos with a given amount, or add n seconds to each subsequent photo. 
    Warning:  does not work when there are not already EXIF data. For example for scanned or downloaded photos you better add a "date taken" in Picasa first. 

    • 1. Open Irfanview and hit T to show Thumbnails view and find the folder you need. The photos are sorted by name, for example as renamed in Picasa. If not you can drag selected photos to the place you want.

      2. Select multiple thumbnails (using Ctrl+A for all or hold Ctrl and Shift keys and click as usual)

      3. Go to  File > JPG Lossless Operations < Change Exif date (date taken)

      4. You can now:

         • "Set EXIF date to" 

           • set a time to give all selected photos the same date/time

           • also check "Add additional n seconds per file for every subsequent (selected) file" 

         • or "Adjust EXIF time by" ...
           
           

  • Tools for editing the EXIF data may allow more actions, like extracting a date from the filename (for example from photos shared via WhatsApp), and put it in the EXIF data.

    • ExifTool
      https://www.labnol.org/software/change-date-of-pictures/28336/  https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/faq.html#Q5
      https://igouy.blogspot.com/2018/03/by-year-scanned-photos-for-google-photos.html
      https://igouy.blogspot.com/2018/03/by-name-scanned-photos-for-google-photos.html 

    • https://www.exifedit.com

    • BulkFileChanger: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html 

    • https://geosetter.de/en/main-en/ to change time and/or time zone

    • https://www.relliksoftware.com/exifdatechanger/ (for example get date/time from file name)
      Use for example https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/ if you need to rename first

    • Lightroom: Select multiple photos, then update the Date Taken field.
      Save the metadata to the files and upload to Google Photos.

Change order after uploading

Go to Google Photos "Albums": https://photos.google.com/albums and open the album you want to organize.

Drag & drop

At the top right, click the 3-dot menu and click "Edit album"
You can drag-and-drop selected pictures to another position.

The changed order is lost after downloading or adding to another album, for example in another Google Photos library.

Click the "Sort Photos" icon (up and down arrows). 

At the top right, click the 3-dot menu and click "Edit album"

You see the options "Oldest first" Newest first" "Recently added (first)". 

When finished, click the check mark ("Done") in the upper left corner. 

Unfortunately, "Sort by filename" is not possible. Please send feedback in Google Photos to ask for that feature.
Third party extension (not tried - at your own risk): see https://github.com/hamada2029/gphotos_sort

Change date/time in Google Photos

Photos in albums can be sorted by date/time. Changing date/time may thus change the order of the photos.
This will also change the order in the Photos tab and other albums where the photo is added. 

• 1. • 1. Select one or more photos

       2. At the top right, click the 3-dot menu and click "Edit date & time"

This only changes times in the Photos database, not in the EXIF data. Changed dates are lost after downloading, but kept when added to another album or using "Add to library" after sharing.

Warning: there may still be issues when photos in the album have different time zones. The timezone can be adjusted in batch in Google Photos: 

1. Select all photos to be corrected

2. Click 3-dots > Edit date & time 

3. Pull down the Time zone menu and correct the zone.  Google will automatically change the time to keep the photos in what it thinks is the correct order. You will have to (i) remember the time as it is before changing the zone, and (ii) reset that time.