Sort option missing on Photos App for iPhone and iPad!

I have a 14 pro max and I do NOT have a sort option! This is so very annoying. To be paying so much for iCloud storage & not being able to sort your own photos within the app, is beyond Ridiculous! Like one other person was saying, this is a ‘basic’ option when sorting folders. I have over 9000+ photos. I recently had to sync them on my MacBook bc I was traveling internationally, so they wouldn’t upload. Now, I have over 650 duplicates and they’re ALL now out of order. This has caused me total chaos! I’m beyond frustrated. I’m ready to switch to another product! Apple is making some HUGE mistakes.

I do not have the sort option either. I have a new iPhone 15 Pro. No sort option in albums or main folder. My folders look exactly as pictured earlier in this thread.

Photos cannot manage the photos in "From my Mac" at all, as Richard explained. They are just shown in Photos, but not a part of the Photos Library. If you want to manage them with Photos, add captions, add adjustments, create albums, sort them, you have to copy them into your Photos Library on the iPhone.

Consider to use iCloud Photos for syncing photos from your Mac to your iPhone. It is the easiest way to get your photos from the iPhone to the Mac and back, and it is the a complete syncing. Anything you do on your iPhone with your photos will sync back to the Mac and vice versa.

The manual syncing with the Finder or iTunes and the iCloud syncing are mutually exclusive. As soon as we enable iCloud Photos on a mobile device all manually synced photos will be erased. Turning on iCloud Photos is a quick and easy way of getting rid of all synced photos at once.

The synced photos are just a selection of photos and videos intended for viewing on the device. And they are delivered downsized, optimized for the iPhone or iPad, just large enough for the smaller displays.

The synced photos are kept separately, because they might be duplicates of photos already on the iPhone and because of the lesser quality.

When we want to have the photos in the full quality on or mobile devices, properly imported to the library, we need to transfer them differently, for example by Air Drop or Mail or with iCloud Photos.

The sort order of photos in synced albums has been a problem ever since Apple introduced the feature to sync albums with photos to our mobile devices, even in the good old times of iPhoto and Aperture, when we used iTunes to sync the albums. The users want the photos to be sorted in a specific way, but the developer team does not seem to have the necessity high on the list of requirements to preserve the sort order in an album .

For a short time there has also been a Support document explaining, that the photos will be synced with iTunes to the mobile devices, but not the sort order in the albums - this document has been removed and I can only find out on the wayback machine:(https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT4221).

Some background information in this discussion: When will iTunes Photo sync order be fixed - Apple Community

Over the years I have seen variations on these statements on the sort order:

• June 22,2010, iOS 3.1: https://web.archive.org/web/20100630003320/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4221

iOS: Understanding photo sorting

The order in which photos synced from your computer are sorted in the photo albums of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch depends on the software you are using on your computer. Learn how this works in iPhoto, Aperture, and other software.

By default, photos sort according to the date modified (in ascending order).

When syncing photos from a Mac or PC, some apps may sort your photos in the order you specify in the app (such as iPhoto or Aperture). If your app does not support this feature, photos will be sorted by the date modified.

In addition to albums and events, synced photos appear in a unified category called Photo Library (on iPad, this is the Photos tab). Photos are not duplicated. This category will also sort photos in ascending order by the date modified.

Additional Information

If you are using an earlier version of iOS

iOS 4 sorts photos by the Date Taken tag of the photos. iOS 3.1.3 and earlier sort photos alphanumerically by the photos' file names.

None of Apple's current support documents is promising that synced photos in albums will arrive in the same order as in the source album. If they do, it is probably an unsupported feature that can break any time.

Even within a Photos Library the sort order of the photos in an album can get lost, when we add photos to a project for a slideshow or to a shared album. Albums seem to be treated mostly as unordered sets of photos and videos, not as an ordered sequence of photos.

I can understand this, because it is a daunting task, having to sync consistently between many different platforms running different system versions.

Your last screenshot showed the whole screen, and that was helpful. But I've got to say, I can't repeat your screen. This is mine.

This is an album that is not in a folder. I went to Albums (like we both show at the bottom of the screen), selected the album, and then clicked on the 3 dots.

Did you do anything differently? How were your pictures loaded on to your phone? Mine came from iCloud syncing with my Mac. Some things are different with albums that are directly loaded on to a phone from a computer.

I don't know how pictures from Windows behave differently.

I just recently moved from android. Apple shows all the videos photos(in different folders) that i copied from android in recents and in some random order. Unable to atleast view these pics in the order the pictures were taken or created.

These pictures were in different folders like gallery, whatsapp, twitter, FB etc. They are just shown in some random order. Atleast if they are shown in the date created, it was fine. I am not able to sort pics in recents too.

The Photos app is showing them to you, but it's not organizing them. I'm not sure what good it does to tell me and the community what it should do. I was just trying to help you figure out what was going on. If you would like to talk to Apple, you can leave feedback here.

Feedback - Photos - Apple

I notice that "Zoom Out" is listed as an option, indicating that you are zoomed in. Albums can't be sorted while zoomed in. Try zooming out first.

Or perhaps, instead of albums, you meant automatically created views like Screenshots.

Automatically created views like Screenshots or Bursts, can't be sorted. Since they are created automatically for you by Apple, their selection and sorting are specified with their creation.

If you want to sort your pictures, you can make your own album, and then you will see the sort option, if you're zoomed out.

I haven't transferred pictures from my Mac directly in a while, but I think it may produce a category of "From My Mac" pictures that have less flexibility. I think it produces an album or folder titled "From My Mac." Do you have one of those?

Yes, it's weird, but "From My Mac" pictures are stored completely separately from Photos pictures-- they are not in the Photos Library. I'm not sure why-- they may interfere with the whole iCloud syncing thing, and so must be excluded. Having two methods of "syncing" could cause problems. Or it may be so people can specifically load pictures that are not part of the Photos system, perhaps from other operating systems. (Just making stuff up, here.) But that's what's going on, here, and it's why muggy and I don't see it.