Q: Photos out of order in Events after iOS 8 update

Apple, with the introduction of IOS 7, began using the known tags of an iPhone photo, namely time and place, to organize photos into years and places to create occurrences. For those folks who only had photos taken on their iPhones and had never organized or titled their photos this was a step forward. However the unintended consequence for photo freaks like me and many of you, who have thousands of photo from diverse sources and dates other than iPhone, it created utter havoc, as everyone in this discussion group are so well aware. The problem was amplified with IOS8 when control of the sync was apparently delegated entirely to date and place and re-ordered the sort order of previously installed events.

I have 23,433 photos in 158 Events. Eighteen of this 158 Event folders contain what I would call Generic photos that are not connected directly to life events. These are tagged with various titles, following a space, and sort alphabetically prior to the remaining 150 Event folders which are titled year.month.date (XXXX.XX.XX).

All of my “regular” event photos are likewise each individually titled year,month,date and title. Over the years I have used the iPhoto feature “batch change” to date and place tag those non iPhone photos. When the recent fiasco began I’ve tried to make ALL my Events as much like iPhone photos as possible. Photos in IOS8 apparently doesn’t recognize photos prior to 1900. I have false date tagged all my generic events with the years 1901 and forward.

In syncing from iTunes I select photos, deselect sync all from iPhoto, select sync specific events and use the pulldown no events. Then select and sync one event at a time. Unfortunately the system has a certain protocol for each event and even one or two photos in and event folder takes a minute or two to complete. With 158 event folders at two minutes each it’s a real time consuming process. Once the photos are synced I select in iPhoto sync all photos and albums. Unfortunately faces remain unsorted.

I’ve backed up my iPhone and used that back up to restore my wife’s iPhone and iPad with success.

I’m as angry as any of you at what has occurred. I choose however to fix the problem now. I’m confident that Apple will eventually resolve the problem as they’ve always done in the past I read, and confirmed, on the discussion site where someone had discovered that photos appear in properly sorted order in Wallpaper settings. It’s puzzling to me, but gives hope that the problem will soon be resolved.

DickSCW

What a joke from a company who is supposed to make products that "just work."  What a load.

I'm a commercial photographer. I just upgraded to iPhone 6 and synched my photo portfolio album thru iTunes. Yup, it scrambled ALL the photos in the album. Makes me nuts. The iPhone tries to sort in some unexplainable formula … but subject? …. by date? Apple couldn't answer this. No offense. Sooooooo

Here's the solution. Build the album on your MAC in a folder. Name the folder 'iPhone Portfolio' [whatever you like]. Now name the photos all the same thing 'JoeSchmo' and add a numerical sequence beginning with 001 then .Jpg  Should look like this …. JoeSchmo001.jpg Then JoeSchmo002.jpg

You can automate the renaming of your photos in Photomechanic or in similar file management. I have 156 photos in my portfolio album. [It helps to reduce the photo size. Mine are 7mb. The open instantly].

Now synch your iPhone thru iTunes, select the album and tap Apply. It works. Knowing my portfolio and it's order is really important to me when showing a potential client. 'Can you shoot food?' Sure. Here you go. 'Can you shoot pro sports?' Sure. And so on.  

adimagesNov 6, 2014 8:43 PM Re: Photos out of order in Events after iOS 8 update
Re: Photos out of order in Events after iOS 8 updatein response to mrbofus

I'm a commercial photographer. I just upgraded to iPhone 6 and synched my photo portfolio album thru iTunes. Yup, it scrambled ALL the photos in the album. Makes me nuts. The iPhone tries to sort in some unexplainable formula … but subject? …. by date? Apple couldn't answer this. No offense. Sooooooo

Here's the solution. Build the album on your MAC in a folder. Name the folder 'iPhone Portfolio' [whatever you like]. Now name the photos all the same thing 'JoeSchmo' and add a numerical sequence beginning with 001 then .Jpg  Should look like this …. JoeSchmo001.jpg Then JoeSchmo002.jpg

You can automate the renaming of your photos in Photomechanic or in similar file management. I have 156 photos in my portfolio album. [It helps to reduce the photo size. Mine are 7mb. They open instantly].

Now synch your iPhone thru iTunes, select the album and tap Apply. It works. Knowing my portfolio and it's order is really important to me when showing a potential client. 'Can you shoot food?' Sure. Here you go. 'Can you shoot pro sports?' Sure. And so on.

Well, I found a "Solution" to out or order events. I put "Solution" in quotes because its more like torture than a resolution but after a few hours of work my events are all sorted right...kinda.

My Aperture Events sorting was based on dated folders (2011-0101 New Years or 2014-1005 Disneyland Vacation) so Pretty much I removed all check boxes in the iTunes folder and manually added them back in by checkmarking them back in groups and doing a sync. iTunes Sync (especially for Photos) is eternally slow so It was frustrating, fatiguing and other F words but in the end I got it all done on my iPad. Then on my iPhone. Then on my wifes iPad and iPhone.

Obviously this situation is a mess because Apple created a problem where there wasnt one previously (just like with Camera Roll). So what gets me worried is that it seems the people in charge of Photos seem to be people who don't actually use their iOS devices to take/view/manage photos. And that doesnt bode well for the death of iPhoto/Aperture in favor of Photos.app.

I am having the same problem. My photo events are completely out of order after ios8 upgrade.  I called Apple support and they could care less. As my friend said who uses the Android system, "when we get updates, it's a good thing".  My solution:  I'm done with Apple.  My photos are completely useless to me right now.

Since aperture will be discontinued next year and replaced by some new photo (I assume something less professional) I did the change to Lightroom right now. Adobe offers a migration tool which works quite nice although not all meta-data will be transferred correctly. And with a bit of work afterwards all my events sync now correctly.

Well guess what....this random thing appears to not only be confined to iOS, but iPhoto on the Mac as well.  Yesterday, I noticed my photostream was not syncing on one of our Macs.  I turned off photostream and re-synced.  I now had the missing photos, but now all my shared photostreams are in random order and not chronological as they used to be.  Either this is some sick joke being played on all of us, or they really have lost their minds over there at 1 Infinite Loop.  Either way it's sad.  Hopefully they get their act together soon, or I as well will be forced to look elsewhere for photo organization and sharing.

I just discovered something unexpected (my apologies if it's already been mentioned in this thread, which is up to 15 pages, and I haven't read every post): if you're in, say, a webmail site in Safari on your iOS device (mail.google.com, for example) and you go to attach a file, when you get to your photo library, all of the albums are in chronological order. This certainly allows finding and selecting photos conveniently, the way it used to work in the iOS photos app. But if you're just in Photos trying to find something to view, you're out of luck, as everyone here has discovered.

I can't help but think that the crazy ordering of albums in Photos is not an accident - if the file selection function in other apps can work, then surely Photos could work, too. For reasons that Apple won't disclose, the ordering of albums in Photos is based on some algorithm that makes it effectively impossible to browse if you've got more than a couple dozen albums. This would not have been missed in testing, and, in fact, was probably understood in the design phases (at least it would've if I had been an engineer on the project, and there are plenty of excellent SW engineers in Cupertino).

This kind of stuff reduces my confidence in Apple's commitment to customers by just another little bit. I'm not quite ready to defect to Android devices, yet (although I just got a Blackberry Q10 - it's got its problems, too), but hey, there's other stuff out there that's starting to look cool. Like Amazon's Fire Stick (Apple has nothing like any of these little HDMI streaming sticks, yet).

Well there have been 27,000 people looking at this post/subject but only 260 odd of us have commented and complained. We aren't getting any answers from Apple so I guess we are lumbered unless they have a change of policy. Meanwhile I've sold my iPad and will soon sell my laptop. Wish I could have learnt about this before spending £750 on iPhone 6 plus..... And that is not a rant Apple, just agreeing with the 260 people before me.

The only problem with this is that it doesn't make sense.  If the ordering in Photos is not an accident, why do other Apple apps (Settings, Contacts, etc...) see the photos in the correct chronological order?  If the random ordering in Photos was the intent, then the other Apple apps should conform to this new random order too, right?

I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but as a longtime software developer, I'll tell you why, if Photos behavior was known by Apple before release, other apps don't do it (and I accept that it's not a totally satisfying explanation): the organization that did the new functionality of Photos is not the same organization that's responsible for other apps or for functionality of the base platform. There are a lot of apps for which file browsing/selection is a small part of their functionality, and, as a matter of fact, they don't all implement it independently, they use common features that already exist on the platform. They wouldn't be bothered to try to match what Photos currently does.

I haven't looked at the app dev APIs in quite a while, but if I have time, I'll take a look and see what the file picker API does. I'll bet anything it does "sane" browsing of the photo library. The Photos app would've been developed independently with its own UI to present, browse, and select photos. Why they chose to deviate from the behavior of the common navigation platform resources I couldn't guess, but as everyone here knows, it's radically different.

Anyway, I think that what could be going on strategically is that they're evolving the Photos app (and, eventually, the entire platform) to a different way of working with user content. We already see that we're being pushed to iCloud (which is a nice source of revenue for Apple), and I suspect that the medium-term strategy will reveal a lot more changes in that direction. We won't know for some time what Photos (and eventually Music and other content-mgmt apps) will do, but I'm sort of thinking I won't like it. I can't do everything in iCloud or in a network-dependent environment for both security and practical reasons (I travel a lot to places where I'm off the grid for extended periods). Time will tell.

We could speculate 'til the cows come home, and there are Apple watchers who might have better ideas on this than us. It's not random. I've noticed some patterns, as have a few other people who've replied here. For example, it appears to have something to do with the order in which albums are sync'ed into the Photos app's library on the iOS device (I plan to fool around with this a bit). It may be an artifact of internal design features that will serve some as-yet-incomplete functionality. But why they would expose this behavior now, I don't really have any idea. It's certainly not useful - in fact, it's worse than useless.

If I figure out what the algorithm is, and a way to get it under control, I'll follow up here. If not, we'll just have to wait to see what Apple comes up with next. No idea when that will be, other than what we already know about Aperture going away.