Q: iPad photo sort order changed with iOS 5

Start the first photo as 0001, the next as 0002 etc and this will cater for 10,000 photos! If you want to put them in groups the prefix the number with a,b,c, etc!

Then what happens when you want to change the order of just one or two photos?  You go through renaming all 10,000 photos again?  Why not just spring for a decent photo management app like Photo Shack or Photos Pro?

well, i have a couple of the 3rd party photo apps (Foliobook and PhotoMgrPro) and NONE of them are as seamless/fluid/sleek as the built-in Photo app.  My problem with this whole thing is that the user definable sort orders worked in iOS4 like a charm, but it's not working the way it should in the current iOS.

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.

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").

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).

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.

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!

2xboxbmliphone: I am not sure, that Apple fixed this issue. I have latest version of iTunes and iOS 5.1.1 as well, but I have still a problem with order of photos saved on network drive. Connection between my MBP and network drive is via AFP protocol.

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.

Well, perhaps this is only true for iphone... I did state that I am 3GS.. I know this thread was originally for ipad. I came across it while searching for this issue way back... I think was only one I could find. Maybe I should have started one of my own. Sorry....

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

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...

Yep...problem solved for me and iPad !

Downloaded iTunes 10.6.3, connected iPad to MBP, ran iTunes sync with photo files blank selected (to clear pics from iPad), ran iTunes sync with all files selected.

Perfect and quite fast for 5700+ pics. All now in original folders and in date taken sequence. Sigh.......

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...........