Willy-nilly

[LannyC]

Yes, this is about the iOS8 Photos app. One of the main reasons I bought my iPad was to share photos with friends. In addition to taking lots of photos with the built-in camera, I have scanned hundreds of 35mm slides from 40 years of vacation trips. Naturally, I want these organized into albums by trip, with the albums in order and the photos presented sequentially within each album.

I want to do all this organization on my iMac, where I have access to file names, and sync to the iPad. Now, with iOS8, it seems impossible to impose any sort of logic on my photo collection. Images are out of order, the "cover" photos on the faces of the albums are assigned at random, and I haven't a clue how to fix it. All the file names use sequential numbering for alphabetical sorting, which Photos ignores. Some albums have even had file modification dates adjusted manually, which used to work, but that isn't recognized anymore either. I've found no Apple documentation about file order, and old, pre-iOS8 tips online don't appear to work.

Ideas, anyone? I do NOT want to dump all my photos into the pile formerly known as the Camera Roll and add them to alias albums--the ordering on those is unreliable as well, sometimes becoming scrambled with OS updates.

 

[Ibill]

Put all my photos on Drop Box. Can access them on ipad, Windows computer and android phone.

 

[LannyC]

Thanks, Bill. Not the best solution when no wifi is available, though.

 

[twerppoet]

Not that Photos in iOS 7 was much better for what you want.

I expect you'll be able to do what you want, at least some of it, sometime this spring; when the new Photos app comes out for Mac and iOS devices.

Until then, you might want to take a look at Photo Manager Pro. I don't use it myself, be a lot of members who have asked similar questions to yours seem to be happy with it.

You might even like it enough to keep it after Apple finishes it's revamp of how photos work in iOS and OS X.

 

[LannyC]

It appeared that iOS8 Photos was ordering files by date, not sure whether creation or modified. So, I downloaded a tool to edit file dates, and went to work on one album on my iMac. Once all dates were corrected, I moved the album from the iMac's synced folder, synced the iPad, replaced it and synced again. Some of the out-of-order images were fixed, but now others were randomized. There seems to be no hope at all. Photos is simply brain dead.

 

[LannyC]

Update: SUCCESS! File order within a synced album is indeed according to date, but it took a couple of dozen remove-file/sync/replace-file/sync-again iterations before all the changes "took" in Photos. I have no idea why it was so stubborn. I force quit Photos before each sync.

I still haven't found a way to arrange albums or specify (nay, even predict) which image appears on the "cover."