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iPad photo sort order changed with iOS 5

The Photos application packaged with iOS 4 always sorted the photos by the "date taken" from the EXIF data.

The Photos application packaged with iOS 5 uses some other sorting scheme. Possibly "none".


Can anyone shed any light, or is this a bona fide bug?

Posted on Oct 13, 2011 10:43 AM

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202 replies

May 21, 2012 7:35 AM in response to tmronin

I just purchased an iPad 3 primarily for managing photos. I am now thinking about returning it.


I have IOS 5.1.1. I spent hours ordering my photos within albums on my PC, renaming them so they are in alphabetical order, then syncing to the iPad. The regular photo app seems to work fine. But I want captions, so I use iPhoto. It does NOT display them in the same order!!! I can't figure out what it is using and I can't be bothered spending a lot more time figuring it out. If Apple cannot get such a mind-blowingly simple soution as providing users the option of how they want the photos ordered, then I really don't want to trust my images to that company. I now see why a tech-support friend of mine will use only PC's and will have absolutely nothing to do with Apple!


So sad - it is really a beautiful screen and the pics look great.

May 21, 2012 7:42 AM in response to RickP8

Guys,


do NOT bother with the stock Photos. It's really a substandard app, particularly if you want to transfer several hundred / thousand pics to your iPad.


Go for something better. There are a lot of third-party apps with custom (also EXIF date-based) sorting capabilities. Of them, I prefer Photo Manager Pro the most. Get it (or any other, capable third-party image viewer) and forget Photos. The latter doesn't really deserve anything else, it's that bad - no wonder this forum alone is full of threads complaining about its problems and bugs. (Sorry Apple...)


There's an excellent roundup of current image viewers at http://www.iphonelife.com/blog/87/all-one-photo-viewer-roundup-70-price-drop-bes t-image-viewer . It has a dedicated section on sorting with an example screenshot ("2.1.3 Sorting").

May 21, 2012 8:27 AM in response to RickP8

Forget about the Photos App. You will never get it right; it just doesn't work. And from what I've read from other People, iPhoto has its own little bugs. After fighting with this issue form months (and waiting HOURS trying to order photos), I went with Photo Manager Pro which is an excelent app. You can do everything you can't with Apple's sofware: order pictures in the order you want, any order; copy, paste, transfer... you name it, it does it.


There is another way to have pictures ordered as like, and this solution saves a lot of space on your device, because the pictures are actually NOT in your device's memory: SkyDrive. Upload your photos to SkyDrive, order them as you like, get the SkyDrive App, and display your photos directly from the cloud. Granted, the resolution is not super, but if you use your iPad just to show pictures to your friends or to dispaly stuff that you sell, it works great. Also, you can forget about sync'ing photos, having to do it for every device you have, etc. As long as the pictures are in order in your SkyDrive folder, they will appear in that order on any of your devices (and any computer).

May 21, 2012 8:38 AM in response to ChristofBaer

If you don't want to rely on Internet connectivity to view your own photos, and don't want to have to re-save all of your photos in a separate app, then the way to go is to get Photo Shack or Photos Pro. Both are excellent photo managers that run entirely off of your existing iOS Photos Library. You won't need to "sync" these apps separately or duplicate any of your photos. Photos Pro has more extensive organizing and sorting capabilties. I started out with Photo Shack, but now have Photos Pro. I am very happy with the added functionality.

Jun 13, 2012 3:28 AM in response to Orthonormal

Apple has fixed this issue!! The iTunes 10.6.3 update has FINALLY fixed this issue!! They even state this fix in the notes, along with a couple others I've heard about. I've been on 10.3 with 4.2.1 mostly this whole time. As previously stated, I've had this problem on my 3GS since iOS 5 and 10.5 came out. Photos out of order on 3GS after update to iTunes 10.5 and iOS 5... I downloaded and updated to 10.6.3 and did a DFU restore to 5.1.1 stock, and setup as a new phone(not from backup of course), then put everything back on. SUCCESS!! My pics are now in their proper chronological order again without messing with any photo cache, exif data or renames etc!! YAY Apple!! Only took you 8 months to fix it, but thank you!! (I'm sure they're not reading this but oh well)... Hopefully other folks will grab this and get back to normal again! You may have to unsync photos from device, delete the photo cache, and sync pics back again. Try it first without doing that. Please Like if this helps!! Thanks all!

Jun 13, 2012 8:56 AM in response to Petr80

Edit: this is crazy... I synced the same photo folder to my iPad3 and iPhone4. For iPad is valid my answer above, BUT in iPhone are photos sorted right. I tried sync some other folders and they are ordered wrong in both iDevices.

(iPod photo cache was deleted)


Based on this I must using still Photo Manager Pro.

Jun 13, 2012 12:03 PM in response to Petr80

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!


After only a few days - well, 7 or 8 months they fixed an issue that probably took 2 hours of programming, maybe less. What a user- friendly company :-)


I removed all faulty albums from my iPAD 2, (the ones where chronological order matters!) and resynced them. It is now as good as in autumn 2011. User sort order, moving around photos with one finger on the iPAD? No... different orders like sizes, name or whatever... Nope. Nothing, nada. But at least they now have ONE working sort order, the chronological.


One luck user from Germany.


Bernie

Jun 13, 2012 3:29 PM in response to Orthonormal

Jus downloaded the latest iTunes update an my iPod Touch photos synced back into the order of "date taken"...YEEESSS!!! THank u Apple :-D....however, as stated by xboxbmliphone, this post was originally for iPad.


However, I did notice when I deleted 1 of my folders "completely" from my Touch then re-synced it, the photos were in order of date, but when adding more 2 the album again, the order messed up.......something 2 improvise with...

Jun 19, 2012 8:19 AM in response to tiredoldkiwi

Oh, oh...I do NOT want my photos in date taken sequence. I have sorted them on my PC in the order I want and then renamed them so the name order is correct. If getting the new version of iTunes goes and puts them in date taken sequence that will be totally wrong!! So I assume I cannot update my iTunes (currently 10.6.1.7) if I want to maintain the correct order.


What a mess. When will Apple get this right!! I was planning on gertting something like Photo Shack Pro for other reasons and I understand that it allows me to specify the sort order. I guess that could solve my problem. But really...........

Jun 19, 2012 6:06 PM in response to tiredoldkiwi

So the pictures are in order by date, but what about the albums? I have about 50 albums, and they are NOT sorted by album name as they used to be. When you choose whether to sync all photos or certain albums only, the album names are listed on the screen by album name in alphabetical order, but they don't sync that way. They are in some random order. I updated to latest version of itunes, then chose zero albums to sync, let it clear, and then selected all albums to sync. Should I have done an additional step?

iPad photo sort order changed with iOS 5

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