P: Sort order syncing on mobile

I hate to bump a 7-year old thread, but this exactly describes the current situation I'm still seeing with LrClassic 10.3 release in conjunction with LrMobile (Android - current as of June 2021).

To reiterate the issue: I have a Collection carefully built on my Classic desktop version with 253 images of my deceased father-in-law, scans going back to the 1930's up to March 2021.  We've put hours into this to determine the correct order for display for the family memorial - great memories, discussions, arguments and all.  It's done.  It's finally perfect.  So I share the collection in order to run the slideshow at the memorial - and it's a hot random mess when viewed on the web or my device.  Thank g*d it doesn't sync that order back to my desktop or I would be beyond angry.

There's lots of workarounds to "make it happen" - I finally just exported the Collection and prepended an "nnn" image number from the Classic desktop and used that to build an actual video in DaVinci with proper (not random like Lr Slideshow did) KenBurnsEffect zooms and pans.  I could obviously import this folder and share as a new collection sorted by filename or something.

I could go set the "capture date" of all the scans, but I won't, because we don't know the actual date for any of them - just a guess at the year to get them in order. Setting something random by year would make them sortable in cloud, but my rule so far for over 180,000 images is that if there's a value in the capture metadata tag in my library, it's the correct one.  If I don't know it, I don't set it.  Period.  Otherwise, what good is that field?

I guess this comment is just to ask, why doesn't the custom order in collections sync?  Is it just to prevent us from moving things around on mobile accidentally and having the desktop collection rearrange (since it never synced in the first place from Desktop->Mobile, I am *very, very* happy that it didn't suddenly sync from Mobile->Desktop!!).  

Are there plans to fix this?  I believe the order should be able to be kept in sync everywhere.  Whichever device/location *created* the collection should be in control and provide the sort order.  Since I built mine on the desktop, I expect that source to at the minimum "own" the sort order and push it to anything that syncs (web and mobile).  If that means you can't re-order on mobile, well, so be it.

However, it would be nice if there *could* be some way to work on a synced collection on a mobile device, but I would definitely want to be careful (and be in control of when it syncs!) about pushing custom order changes back to the other copies.  It would have been nice to grab a tablet and sit on the couch with the other elderly folks in this case while discussing the order, but it sure is easy to touch something on a tiny screen and whoops, suddenly everything is messed up.  So maybe a manual checkbox or something, or else just disallow it.

I've been using the custom sort order with my collections on the mobile app since it was first introduced.


All of a sudden (last week or so) re-arranging the collection order in the desktop app is not showing on the mobile app or on the Lightroom website.


I've tried un-syncing/re-syncing and deleting the cache on the mobile app And playing with the sort options and going back.

What else can I try?


I'm using the latest mobile version and latest CC version on the desktop.

It doesn't sort the public gallery, only the private link.

Not sure if you found a solution, but I have just had the same problem.

This worked for me:
Visit your LR mobile site on the web (in a browser), go into the gallery you are looking to sort. Click the downward arrow in the middle at the top of the thumbnails gallery and it gives you an option to select 'Custom order'. The default seems to be 'Capture time'. Clicking custom order mirrored the order I had set in the collection on LR desktop. (Not sure if the same arrow shows up in the iPad version.)

I'm surprised to see that I've been using LrD 5.4 and not LrD 5.5! I figured that with all the automatic updates happening lately for my Photoshop CC for photographers (with Photoshop and LR), it would have kept my LrD up-to-date automatically. I'm on a Macbook Pro Retina running Mac OSX 10.9.3 and LrM 1.1 on an iPad Air running IOS 7.1.1. Now that I've upgraded to LrD 5.5, it seems to work now. Thanks.

However, I find that there is no way on LrM to change the custom/user order of the images; you have to go back to LrD to do so, and I would really like to be able to do this in LrM while away from my machine with LrD on it. Hopefully, that will be a feature of LrM 1.2. Then I'll finally be able to throw away the Photo Manager Pro app for iPad I've been using all this time, to prepare portfolio presentations (albums) of my images on my iPad; I find I like to spend time on my iPad fine tuning the order of images in my portfolio.

@7327779:
Which LrD version are you using and which OS are you using?

I have the same problem. No, un-sync and re-sync didn't change anything.

Regardless of the User Order in LR desktop, when syncing to LR Mobile, the collection appears sorted by Capture Time, the first available sort order in the list. Changing the sort order to Custom Order seems to then randomize the images.

I've tried it with two collections of 20 images and 19 images respectively, but don't plan on bothering with any more. I don't want to have to put them into my desktop's User Order again, after syncing to LR Mobile.

How does Adobe think this should work?

did it help?

One collection has 151 images and another has 54. Both are sorted via User Order on the desktop. No other filtering is being used.

I'm going to try to un-sync then re-sync to see if that has any effect.

Custom order in Lr should show the same on the Lr Mobile. How many images do you have in the collection?
Do you have any other kind of filtering on in Lr Mobile?