How does iPhone sort photos synced to it? (WinXP)

I'm wondering if there will eventually be a way where all photos can be custom sorted. In my own particular preference, it would be great to be able to sort photos reverse chronologically by date taken. This way, they wouldn't be alphabetical or chronological, but REVERSE chronological, meaning, when I open up Photos, regardless of whichever folder I'm in, all of my most recent photos will always be up at the top. I take a lot of pictures of my girlfriend and it's up to 326 right now. So if I want to see the most recent photos, I always have to scroll ad infinitum to the very bottom of the list. I should be able to make it custom sort so that the most recent ones are at the top, or at least I should be able to change the view while in any particular folder. Just my two (and a half) cents.

This is just an epic fail Apple. The fact that a software engineer (including Apple programming) with 15 years experience and experienced photographer can spend 3 hours trying to just simply sort some photos and still not come up with a simple solution, to something so very very basic and expected of a photo album (you call the app "photo album", but I'm pretty sure if I grab a photo album off my book shelf I can move a photo to a new position pretty easily) is ridiculous

Something so simple, so obvious, yet so incredibly difficult to do....very un-apple of you

Extremely frustrating. Every time an iPhoto or iOS update is released, I wipe and re-sync my entire photo library (8k+ photos) in the hopes that this simple issue is resolved.

Windows 7 Fail:

I have tried updating exif data and file names.. nothing works (updating, deleting - batch changing etc...) - all you get is yet another random order. I really cant see how this can be done easily. But this does work:

1. Copy one pic into your picture folder and sync to iphone

2. Repeat

And all in perfect order - of course this can take a huge amount of time

Also IOS 5 does not add any sort options - Great job apple

Photo Opus wrote:

Solution from within Aperture:
1. By manually moving just a single image in Aperture project, the sort order will automatically become "Custom". Custom will appear in a drop down in the upper left hand corner of the Aperture Browser window.
2. Re-sync and the iPhone order will match the Aperture order.

This works until you add new photos, at which point, the new photos are added to the end rather than to the beginning. I'm using smart albums in Aperture 3, synced to my iPhone 4. I was hoping that updating my iPhone to iOS 5 would FINALLY fix this problem, but it doesn't.

NSM17 wrote:

"if your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is using the latest software, it sorts photos by the Date Taken tag of the photos. Specifically, your device uses the pictures' EXIF tags to determine the Date Taken information. Your device will look for the following EXIF tags within your pictures:

Capture Date
Date Time Digitized
Date Time Original
Last Modified"

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4221

The problem is that it sorts using the OLDEST first. What a silly way to sort albums. When viewing photos, one generally starts with the newest, not the oldest.

After a lot of testing of different proposed solutions I can confirm that the sort order is alphabetical. On your windows pc rename the photos alphabetically and ensure sort order in the folder to be synced is by name. When you then sync, the iphone order will be the same as the windows order. Change the filename in windows and the photo will move on the iphone. This works for me although I agree with all comments that the iphone app needs sort options itself!

No, that's crap...we shouldn't HAVE to. I have 14,000 photos on my computer. So because iOS5 or iTunes has a bug now, I MYSELF am supposed to fix everything? Gimme a break. Fix it Apple, sheesh!

The problems seems to be only for Windows users. Sorting is by alphabetically order that's a given. Even after renaming all the photo files (which I did using this program http://www.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html) the pictures will be displayed from oldest to newest because 2008 is first than 2009 and so on.

We need to be able to choose sorting option either on the iPhone setting or in the iTunes program.

I dont want to see the oldest pictures first and i think everyone agrees with me.

Really Apple... with all the cool complex stuff you can do, how tough would it be to add the option to the ios5 photo app to sort by album name? Which was it? Did you not think of it? Really? Or did you think of it and decide to not do it? Either way, you blew this one big time.

And yes it's a real problem. I did all these things suggested here... including manually sorting my albums on my iphone. The next time i synched it was back to where i started. So all that time was wasted.

For those of you who say sort by name works, that's just because your photo dates happen to be in same order as your file names (there really are too many of us having this issue for us all to be technological retards). This fails when you are building a large collection over time... such as scanning old photos. So for the rest of us, there's no solution that doesn't require a lot of work (and then redoing it over and over).

One more thing... i buy Apple products because they make it simple to do what i want. If i really wanted to go around deleting cache files and rebuilding my photo albums all the time, or re-manually sorting a few hundred albums every time i synched, or editing the EXIF tags of a few thousand photos... i'd've gotten an Android phone..

No joke. Ridiculous, with the iPhone being, well, an iPhone. I absolutely love it when they change things without any warning. Everything worked fine, and would have been short of perfection had they just always had an option to allow us to sort photos within each file folder. I did however give up and bow to the corporate master and surrender my will to 1 Infinite Loop, proceeding to search for an online bulk renaming tool. I found Bulk Rename Utility which actually worked pretty good. I found it at http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php. I was able to rename all my photos by a sequential year-month-date formula, preceding the original descriptive text I had assigned to each photo filename. This worked wonders, but still took a ridiculously unnecessary amount of time. Isn't an iPhone supposed to be magical, and ahem, "just work"?

so if the photos that i synced to my iphone are sorted by exif date, why the **** is the photo i just took this morning in the middle? shouldn't it be at the bottom or at the very top? why the **** are photos sorted by date and not alphanumeric, like it was with version 3.1? why don't we have the option to set the sort date?

This doesn't appear to be a windows only issue. I'm using an i7 iMac with an iPhone 4S and am getting the same, frankly ridiculous, random picture and reverse date sorting issue.

We all do it - show our pictures off to friends and family on our iOS devices. What a bad sell for Apple as we have to scroll through hundreds of pictures to get to the one we took yesterday, which is at the end of the photo album not at the begining.

This problem seems to have been around for a while. Really wish it would get fixed.