Q: iPad photo sort order changed with iOS 5

Any news on the new IOS5.1? Does it solve anything?

No, it does NOT.

Personally, I went with Photos Pro on the App Store.  Doesn't do a lot of photo imaging stuff, but very focused on photo data and organization (drag & drop, auto sorting by date, name, title, etc., multiple albums in mulitple libraries), basically everything I wanted to organize my photos the way I want without having to create a separate duplicate copy of my existing iPad Photos Library.  Can even transfer your libraries and albums back to a PC using iTunes "File Sharing".

Ah, i now start to get it. Apple wants to make an extra buck with iPhoto. Sad.

Well too bad for them, i already started using FileBrowser, which offers great help viewing stuff from other computers in the house too.

I am fairly sure this is a Samba or maybe a general network filesystem related bug, I have copied my published photos from the Samba share they are on directly to my Windows 7 desktop and it has fixed the ordering problems I was having. It might be worth reporting this to the Samba team with some debug logs.

I've spent a while debugging this and I am I pretty sure I know what the problem is and there is a solution at least for people sharing files with modern versions of samba.

iTunes is using the order of files returned by QueryDirectory, when this syscall is used on an NTFS directory it returns the files in the directory in alphabetical order, however Samba doesn't presort the results and so people see the random ordering of photos.

The is a VFS module for samba called dirsort that will work round this problem, I've done a fuil write up on my blog http://blog.night-shade.org.uk/2012/03/fixing-ipad-photo-sort-order-with-samba/

I would say its more a bad assumption on the part of iTunes, that I have worked round with samba.

I think if you look at the syscalls that iTunes is making with process explorer when you sync the ordering of the files from the query directory syscall will exactly match the order of the photos you see on your iPad. However my windows knowledge is good enough to know how to fix this for a local drive.

TimJDFletcher: thank for your idea, but I have problem with order of photos with network drive connected via AFP protocol (and with samba protocol of course too). My network solution is based on the Linux Ubuntu server 11.10.

Petr

Can you try a photo sync via samba with the VFS module I suggested?

I read your blog now (my english is very simple so I need a little bit more time to understand your text :-) ).

Please be patient ;-)

TimJDFletcher: Wou, you are amazing. All photos are sorted correctly now (via Samba protocol). Thank you a lot.

Now I go find some solution for AFP protocol (combination of MacOS and Samba on Linux isn't very fast ).

I have found out something more that might help you I'm still looking into it now but this might help you.

The problem might be being shown because of the ext3 feature called dir_index which "Use hashed b-trees to speed up lookups in large directories" according to the tune2fs man page.

Before you starting tinkering with this make sure you have a backup!

If you turn off the dir_index feature like this:

tune2fs -O -dir_index /dev/sdX

And then force a fsck of the device

fsck -y -D -f /dev/sdX

This has helped me get an unsorted list of files from ls -U to return in order, I'm about to try syncing the iPad again without the Samba VFS module.

Hey guys, I've benn following your discussion and it all seems to me as if I'm watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory..!! I don't have a clue what you're talking about... and im jealous! If you have to be a computer wizard just to get the photos in the correct order, then all of us laymen who have just an iPad, a computer and iTunes are doomed. Any suggestions for us poor ******** who are being driven up the walls by Apple with this ridiculous problem and don't have your computing knowledge?

I have managed to sync the photos to my iPad in order but it's in reverse alpherbetical order. So I'm fairly clear where the problem is and what the work around is for Samba.

The problem is that iTunes is assuming either by accident or design that files are returned in a sorted list by the OS when it lists the files in a folder.

This assumption does not hold true when the files are stored on Linux and exported via a network filesystem to iTunes and so you get the files in a "random" disk order.

There is a work around for Samba using the VFS module dirsort, however this is very much a work around and no such work around exists for netatalk as far as I am aware.