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iCloud Photo Shared Album sorting order

Hi There,


I am having a bit of trouble with the shared albums on iCloud.


When I upload photos to the shared album it seems to randomly put the photos in whatever order it likes rather than the order that I have selected.


Is there any reason for this or is there a way to manually sort the photos?

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Jan 1, 2016 1:42 PM

Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Mar 6, 2016 10:40 AM

The terrible thing is the misleading name "Shared Album". We expect to be able to sort an album and to create a gallery of photos. But the so called "Shared Albums" are the old "Shared Photo Streams". Apple changed the name, but not the functionality. As a shared photo stream the share albums are working as expected. You drop a photo every now and then into a shared album and it is transmitted to all subscribers, a nice stream of photos in chronological order.

With the new name "Shared albums" we naturally expect to be able to arrange the photos in any order we think suitable. Apple should really either change the misleading name back to "Shared Photo Stream" or turn the streams into true albums.

8 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Mar 6, 2016 10:40 AM in response to Tobin Rogers

The terrible thing is the misleading name "Shared Album". We expect to be able to sort an album and to create a gallery of photos. But the so called "Shared Albums" are the old "Shared Photo Streams". Apple changed the name, but not the functionality. As a shared photo stream the share albums are working as expected. You drop a photo every now and then into a shared album and it is transmitted to all subscribers, a nice stream of photos in chronological order.

With the new name "Shared albums" we naturally expect to be able to arrange the photos in any order we think suitable. Apple should really either change the misleading name back to "Shared Photo Stream" or turn the streams into true albums.

Mar 6, 2016 10:18 AM in response to Community User

Apple, this is terrible. I have a gallery of 500 images I want to share with my family in the order in which they were taken, not in some random order that they upload. I'm not going to add them one by one. We know this can be done, but why you'd only permit sorting by date added baffles me. Love you, Apple, but sometimes you completely miss the mark. Truly disappointed. I now have to go figure a workaround.

Aug 6, 2017 4:04 AM in response to Community User

I had this problem, too. But I think (fingers crossed) that I have 'solved' it.


When I first tried to create a shared album, I selected all the photos I wanted to share (in Photos on my Mac), did a right mouse click and selected iCloud sharing, or whatever. It uploaded them all and on my Mac the shared album showed them in the right order. But on my Apple TV they were in a random order. So I deleted the shared album and created another one. This time, within the new shared album, I clicked on 'Add photos and videos', selected the photos (or even 'moments' with multiple photos), clicked the 'Add' button and hey presto! The photos appeared on my Apple TVin the right order!


Hope this helps!

Aug 14, 2017 2:06 PM in response to Community User

Workaround I just used:


1) View album in Photos on mac, select All (cmd+a), File > New Album, click OK to new 'untitled album'.


2) Check new untitled album, should have all the photos in date order.


3) Delete all images from shared album.


4) Select all images in untitled album, drag to shared album.


5) Check shared album, everything should be in date order.


6) Delete untitled album.

iCloud Photo Shared Album sorting order

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