iPhone XR Help! iCloud Photos sort order (PayPal donation to whoever can help me!)

[lordofthegins]

Summary:
I have 15000 photos stored in iCloud, with no sync to my iPhone Xr (yet).

When I enabled iCloud photo in iOS, and download all photos to my device, the “All Photos” are out of sync. (2003 photos are most recent etc)

Background
Had my photos on both my iMac and iPhone in perfect sync. Photos from iCloud were both downloaded in full to both devices.

I then upgraded my iMac’s hard drive, which resulted in a full MacOS reinstall. Once done, I opened photos and enabled iCloud photos to get the content back.

After a few days (to ensure there was no sync process left), I checked Photos. While the photos were in perfect date sort order, all the albums were missing which was odd.

Furthermore, when I checked my iPhone, the “All Photos” album sorting was all over the place. When I tapped “Photos”, they were in order. The removal of individual albums has also been synced.

Annoyed, I turned off iCloud photos and deleted all the images. I check the IMac copies were fine and reenabled iCloud photos on iOS. Same thing.

Issue:
It appears the time stamp on the images is correct, as they appear in order in both macOS Photos, and iOS photos in the Photos tab.

What seems to be an issue is that the “modified date” or “imported date” metadata is wrong. The ‘All photos’ album on iOS (a la camera roll), appears to use the modified or imported date for sorting, rather than the captured date.

I’d love some help in changing the modification date / imported date to match the time stamp / capture date.

Right now, there’s no photos on my iPhone as I’m waiting for the library to be correct before I resync

PayPal donation to anyone that can help me fix this.

Cheers !

 

[now i see it]

The ios photos app is a photo organizing hell. Everything that's in the camera roll is organized by the time/date it was most recently put there. Not when the picture was shot. There's no workaround that I know of except to manually duplicate each of your 15,000 photos one by one in the order you want them to be in, then delete the original.
Hardly a viable solution I know for so many images.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

I wrote a tutorial for this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/camera-roll-out-of-order-fix-tutorial.2078937/
It may be useful.

 

[pika2000]

Imo, what Apple has done makes sense.
When I download a new photo or image taken ages ago, I don’t want to have to scroll endlessly to find it when I go to the photos app. Eg. Images graphics used when creating a document. For this, I prefer photos sorted through “last added/imported”.
And for my actual Photos library, Apple gave proper capture date sorting in the Photos tab.

Best of both worlds imo.