iPad photo sort order changed with iOS 5

I have round about 90 Albums on my ipad, which I have organized by leading numbers

representing categories, i.e. 01 Vacation 2008, 01 Vacation 2009,... 02 Business 2008 and so on.

That worked perfect - until iOS 5.

Now the order is totally messed up, I have no idea how I can find certain pictures among the albums and

almost 11,000 pictures.

It is totally useles now.

And the above described solution with creating new folders on the ipad is no solution for me.

What will happen with the next sync?

regards

rmb

This is a really annoying problem. Photostream is also affected (I tried the Windows version to upload pictures taken with my camera to upload pictures).

I used to sync thousands of photos to my IPad but without some kind of order this is useless.

My workaround for now is uploading all my pictures in private albums on Picasa webalbums. For watching this albums I use an app called "Web Albums". With the introduction of Google+ there seems to be no limit on uploading in Picasa. I already uploaded thousand of pictures and hundreds of videos but it counts only as 15 MB against the free limit of 1 GB. So I will upload all pictures I previously had on my IPad plus Videos taken with my camera that did not work on the IPad. In "Web Albums" I can even cache complete albums to use them when I have no internet connection.

Even when this bug gets fixed I think I will stay with this workaround as I do not have to sync to my computer any longer and the photos do not occupy such a lot of space on my IPad. As a bonus I can also access my photos using any webbrowser...

nope, as far as i know - it reverts back to the default order when you sync (or at least it does on my ipad2 via usb).

hmmm....the album order held via wireless sync with no new images added. interesting.

I for one am so glad ios5 sorts by filename again, since this is how I sort photos on my pc. I was one of the many complaining when apple changed from name to date from ios3 to 4.

For people who got used to dates, I realize it's a pain, but names give you so much more control than dates. You get to pick what order you want. If you want dates, just sort by date on PC, and then rename the files so that are in that sequence.

There is no filename ordering. Or at least it's not the preceeding order.

I always sort my pictures by filename and when I got my iPad (only a few weeks ago), I actually had to manually change the DateCreated field to have all pictures show in the correct order on my iPad. With iOS5 now there seems to be no order anymore at all.

If you're now saying you got them ordered by filename, it can only be beacause you deleted all other EXIF/XMP/... meta information from your pictures os that the iPad is using file names as a last possible sorting option. But Apple - really?!?

Bummer. I hadn't tested it, I thought someone else said it was back to filename ordering and was just saying good.

Why can't Apple sort? The music app has lots of sorting issues now too.

Anyway, when they broke photo sorting in os4, I switched to the Web Albums app. You can sort your photos as you like online and then download to different devices (and cache on those devices if you like).

Hi Jonas

I have tried this but it did not work for me. The photos in the new manually created album are in yet another sort order. So I now have 2 albums with same photos with different sort orders. Random !

Apple need to fix this..............

Hi,

As iOS 5.0.1 still has this bug I was researching for a work around for this problem and have found the Windows tool "EXIF Date Changer". This tool helped me to resolve the issue:

1. Delete all existing synchronized photos from iPAD / iPhone (unselect the sync function in iTunes)

2. Delete all ipod photo cache folders in Windows

3. Run "EXIF Date Changer" and select under "Option" that you want to overright the date in the file with the EXIF date when the picture was taken, include all sub folders and tell the tool to overright the original files. Make sure that source folder and destination folder are the same. With this options you can change all file dates to the EXIF date in one go (batch).

4. Activate the photo sync in iTunes again and retransmit all your photos to the iPad / iPhone

5. Sorting order should be OK now.

Best regards,

Tom

Hi Tom

I'm afraid this hasn't worked for me. I've run through your procedure but the photos are still appearing in file name order on my Ipad 2. I'm still on IOS 5.0 mind you but updating to 5.0.1 will probably not solve the problem.

Apple - please fix this and revert the sorting order to date order or give your customers the option to apply custom sort criteria in the IOS photo app. (this is such a basic requirement I can't believe its not there)

So, I see that there are various workarounds for this annoying ordering bug, none of them being really very attractive.

Thanks to one poster, l have downloaded PhotoShackPro from the app store, and while the Gui is not as elegant and fluid as the iPad photo app, it can displayfull Exif information, plus, is perfectly possible to order the photos in a completely free user defined way/ custom sort by simply selecting them (one or several at a time) and freely moving them around. Plus you can get them ordered according to the date when captured.

It is a shame that the Apple photoapp cannot do this by default, and I will not mess around with exotic exif manipulation tools in order to fix the shortcomings of the apple software.

But I am glad I came across the advice to try photoshack pro, albeit it is not really cheap. I will stay with it for now, till Apple will fix the ordering mess.

Cheers, Bernie

Unfortunately I have to admit that I was too fast with my success message :-(. After the new synchronization of over 6000 photos I am more confused than before. The sort order in the "foto" view is correct but within the single "album" view there is not logic order at all anymore (I can't figure out what sort order was chosen by iOS, but it is not by file name, it is not by exif picture taken date and it is not by file (change) date) - For me it looks absoutely randomly! Doesn't make sense at all. Apple, please correct this bug - it's definitively a HUGE BUG!

Tom

Apple must fix this bug. It is a major problem for those who bought iPads for photos. As my wife suggests, this problem that Apple created is similar to taking years of photo albums, dropping them on the floor with all the photos commingling in no discernable order. Apple, please give us the ability to do a rudimentary photo sort or at the very least, return the sort to by "date taken".

This entire issue has been the most frustrating Apple issue I've come across and it is causing me to rethink my iPad vs an Android solution, as many of my colleagues are doing at work - they've been too frustrated with Apple's closed architecture.

I bought the iPad for photography first, and I think Apple should not only offering a rudimentary photo sort, but all the usual options, including custom sort, plus something like vertical photos first, and horizontal after, or the other way round. Tablet computers are ideal for photo display, and there is no reason to limit it's use for that. Hasn't Apple always been advertising making devices for the creative minds? The current iOS photo support dos not do justice to that claim....

Regards,

Bernie

I don't know, if I have the same problem as you have.

All was fine when I imported photos from local drive (ie. drive in my MacBookPro). But when I imported photos to iTunes from network drive via AFP protocol (on Ubuntu server) then all photos are sorted wrong.

I have this problem on my iPhone and iPad since iOS5. Therefore I must copy all new photos to desktop, import to iPad and then deleted from desktop :-(

To all above - where you have your photos ? On local drive or on network as me ?

(sorry for my poor English)