Sort photos by filename on an iPhone/iPad. Apple, why isn't this possible until today?

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Sort photos by filename on an iPhone/iPad. Apple, why isn't this possible until today?

I'm wondering why it isn't possible after all this years to sort photos in an album on the iPad/iPhone by it's filename. This is a basic feature on any photo app. It's really annoying, especially if you want to create an album to use for a photo workshop for e.g. . If you search the web you find many users complaining about this for years. I'm talking about wanting to sort them like:

Photo_001.jpg

Photo_002.jpg

Photo_003.jpg

...

If you transfer those photos to an album on the iPad/iPhone, the photos will be sorted and displayed in a completely mess like:

Photo_023.jpg

Photo_042.jpg

Photo_007.jpg

...

Instead of sorting them by the date of creation, which makes often no sense, there should be the option for sorting them by filename. Alone if you have an album that is mixed of scanned analog photographs and digital photographs, sorting them by it's creation date makes no sense. Should be easy for those at Apple to apply this to iPadOS/iOS.

Never give up hope! :-)

iPhone 6, iOS 12

Posted on Mar 18, 2022 01:11 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

199,893 points

Mar 18, 2022 10:43 AM in response to Cupertino_we_have_a_problem

Previously we could not even see the filenames of our photos on an iPad or iPhone. And could not sort the photos automatically at all.

iOS 15 and iPad OS 15 have brought some long asked for new features. The most recent versions are at least making it possible to see more information about our photos in the Info. We can see the filename, we can add a description, we can sort the photos by the capture date, which is nice when mixing photos from several cameras. And we can correct the capture date, if it is wrong and assign a location to the photo.

Sorting by the title would indeed be helpful, but even Photos for Mac cannot do it - on the Mac we have to copy the filename to the title, if we want to sort the photo by the title.

When I am importing scanned photos to Photos I am changing the date of the photo to the estimated date the analog photo has been taken, so I can easily sort the photos chronologically. You may want to try that for your scans as well. View photos in the Photos app on iPhone - Apple Support

See photo and video information

To see information about a photo or video, tap or swipe up while viewing it in full screen. Depending on the photo or video, you see the following details:

People identified in the photo
A caption field to describe the photo or video, and make it easier to find in Search
Items detected by Visual Look Up
If the photo was shared with you in Messages or another app
The date and time the photo or video was taken; tap Adjust to edit the date and time
Camera metadata such as lens, shutter speed, file size, and more
Where the photo or video was taken; tap the link to view the location in Maps

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Answer 2

Mar 23, 2022 02:21 AM in response to léonie

Hello léonie,

thank you for your detailed answer and for taking your time to help me!!!

I always changed the date of scanned photographs or exported the sorted photographs again without any EXIF-Information hoping they would later be sorted on an iPhone by the creation date / change date of this new export. Sadly that didn't even work. So all we can do is hope that one day Apple will apply this basic feature.

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Sort photos by filename on an iPhone/iPad. Apple, why isn't this possible until today?

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