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

After smashing my head against a brick wall with this problem I too found a solution. Just download Stripper from //www.steelbytes.com (its free) and run it against your folder contents. It strips the date stuff in the blink of an eye and then you can sync the photos to your iPod, iPad or iPhone in the order that you see on your PC.

Certainly worked for me

I'm using Windows 7 with iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and iPod 2nd generation

Dear Alan D.,

YOUR SOLUTION WORKED! Thank you so very much. I used "EXIF Date Changer" on the pictures, deleted the cache like you indicated, and it worked .. all pictures in ABC order! Though it is a manageable process, we should NOT have to do this and Apple should fix this. Again, gratitude.

I have iPhone only one year. Before I had different smartphones (Symbian, Windows Phone, Android). On these I already had problems with sorting photos by date, but I could do it with renaming of photos. But in iPhone there is a different no-understandable sorting so I spent many hours, maybe weeks with sorting and I did realized this:

1. iDevices are renaming everyone photo when you sync it. Photo with the most current date has name “IMG_0001”. The oldest photo in folder has the highest number.
2. Deleting photos from iDevice is useless if you want him to change order, because he has everything in “iPod Photo Cache” and this is for him as a boss. If you want to apply any changes to photos, you have to delete all what is in this folder.
3. iDevice cannot be connected to the computer when deleting cache or organizing photos.
4. iTunes should not be running when deleting cache or organizing photos.
5. All photos should be in one folder. On Windows in Explorer open the folder and it shows you photos. In the right corner you should sort it with details. It will show you list with basic data about photos. Than you right-click on the bar with name, date and type and choose all 4 types of dates. Other detail you don’t need. Every photo has 6 basic types of date and time.

Now the best if you want have photos chronologically is that in all 4 dates there have to be same date and time (precise on a second). Except the column “Date of edit”. If you will make a mistake for a second, it will start be crazy and you can start over.

When you will have all these dates and times corrected, connect you iDevice, where you don’t have any photos.

1. Run iTunes. Delete all photos which you have there (albums not camera roll). Close iTunes. Find folder “iPod Photo Cache” and delete it.
2. Run iTunes and add albums with corrected dates.
3. Sync and check if all photos are chronologically sorted (the best is to go photo by photo). If you will with any mistake, find the photo in computer, compare it with the one before this one and with the one after this one. You have some mistake in date or time. Correct it.
4. If you have all photos corrected, repeat steps “a, b, c”. (Still you cannot have a photos in your iDevice.) If needed, repeat as many times as you need it. And when you will have a luck, iDevice will show them as they should be.

Hope this helps somebody.

Can I just add my two cents and say that while this issue is truly frustrating, I have found a CONCRETE solution that truly did work. Download "Bulk Rename Utility" and install it. Don't use any of the options at the bottom of the program interface UNLESS you still need to rename your filenames to reflect a date, such as 13-01-06 (2013-January-6th is what that means). Only go into "Options" and then "Timestamp". Then just select the middle option for all 3 selections. That option is "Fixed". So you would select "Fixed" for Date Created, Date Modified, & Date Accessed. I set this option up and hit OK. Then I navigated to the folders where my pictures were located, and I hit CTRL-A to select all of them. When I did this, all of the entries under the Created, Modified & Accessed Columns lit up green. I then hit "Rename" in the bottom of his program and voila! Hey presto, it worked like a charm. Nothing actually got renamed; it was just the EXIF attributes that got changed, and now they all have the same date (today) for created, accessed & modified. That really doesn't matter much to me since all of my photos were numbered by a preceding date format, i.e., "13-01-06 Mom & Dad" (the numbers representing 2013-January-6th) or "12-10-27 Party at Wendy's" (the numbers representing 2012-December-27th)....if you number them this way, with date formats preceding all of your filenames, it's a great way to not only keep descriptive filenames attached to your photos but always have them numbered chronologically, and this way they'll always increase in number as the year(s) progress. I GUARANTEE THIS WILL WORK! It's dumb, extremely dumb, that Apple hasn't programed an option into the default camera app by now to allow for different sorting options, but this is a workaround that really truly does work. Once you're done with Bulk Rename Utility, I would recommend deleting your iPod Photo Cache folder on your computer, then desyncing your photos and then resyncing them to your phone. They will then be in chronological date order, I guarantee it.

I think others may have hinted at this, but i only read the first 2 pages and then found a solution that works for me.

Note that all my photos are named YYYYMMDD format so from a filename perspective they are all chronological so I didn't do any testing with filename specifically. My goal was to load photos so they follow the filename order.

I'm working on a mac but the same should apply to windows. Based on my testing, the first sort criteria seems to be the EXIF creation date. That needs to be changed via some batch program, on the mac i use "A Better Finder Attributes 5"

I changed all EXIF dates to a single date and loaded my pics, and found out that the sort order was still not entirely correct according to my increasing filename order. I found that the next sort criteria is the Modified Date. Using the same batch program, I changed the Modified Date to a single date.

Now all my pics are loaded in order accordingly to my chronologically increasing filenames.

When i go to iphone Photo App -> Photo Library the photos are synced in proper order. Also if i go to Photo App -> choose my specific folder which was synced from itunes, they also show up in proper order there.

Hope this helps.

I had the exact same problem on my iPhone 5. After 1 month of seeking, I finally figured out that a small shareware software does perfectly what I needed, without purchasing it. It is called CopyTrans Photo, you can download it from this site: http://www.copytrans.net/copytransphoto.php

When you open it, pick the CopyTransPhoto software in the small upcoming window, the others are not needed. The software immidiately recognizes your connected device, and with a single drag-n-drop you can re-arrange your photos in your folders. Click on the apply button. Worked perfectly for me!

Cheers