P: Web: Public Gallery not sorting correctly

[D2660]

Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom mobile sort collection correctly.  When I make the collection public, the public gallery displayed via the link is not sorted correctly.  The collection spans 4 days.  The whole collection should be sorted from oldest to newest, but the public gallery is all over the place.  The first day of pictures is sorted from newest to oldest, and the rest of the photos are sorted in varying orders and out of sequence.  I have tried un-syncing, re-syncing, changing sort orders from capture date to file name to custom, and nothing works.  Again, it is sorted correctly on Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Mobile.

 It is just the public link gallery that does not sort correctly.  The public gallery has an Icon that allows me to change the sort order.  When I re-sort from newest to oldest, it displays correctly.  When I re-sort from oldest to newest, the incorrect/random order is again displayed. 

This is incredibly frustrating!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Having the same problem. I am not sure how such a major issue has not been fixed yet.. The reason that I am paying my subscription is to share my photos. If I can't control the order from my lightroom CC to be the same as my local albums, then I can honestly not see the reason to use the service. Having my clients to scroll through a long list of photos in order to find the new ones or needing every time to remind them to press the "reverse shorting" button at the top right of the webpage is a major inconvenience. I would appreciate if you can please assign some resources to fix this problem as it causes frustration.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Explain me why photos in a Collection show up in different order all over LR ecosystem, especially in LR Web (as per 26th October 2018)?

• photos in a collection LR Classic CC arrenged via Custom Order
• looking at photos in LR Web via Private Link in Photos tab initially show up in an order arrenged by Capture Date so I need to manually change it to show up in Custom Order, as arranged in LR Classic CC
• but, now photos in LR Web in Display tab show up in totally messed up order that it's not by Capture Date nor by Custom Order set up in LR Classic CC

When you send the link to the Collection the photos show up in the latter option, the same way as in LR Web Display tab is showing. It takes a lot of time to do the double work arranging the photos to show up as initially intended in LR Classic CC via Custom Order.

This drives me nuts.

Why are you making me lose time with something this trivial?

Can anyone in Adobe Lightroom team explain me why photos show up in totally different order between LR ecosystem (desktop, web, shared link)?

Thank you for listening.

Using LR Classic CC 7.5 on a Mac with macOS 10.12.6.

EDIT: It gets more messed up if you add photos to a Collection in multiple steps.

[Alex Dixon]

@anssik Thanks for taking the time to describe this in such detail. It sounds like there's a problem with LR Classic CC syncing the custom order properly based on what you're describing.
If you re-arrange the photos in LR Classic CC in custom order, that *should* be what we're displaying in LR Web. I'm sorry to hear that's not what's happening for you.

So far we haven't been able to reproduce the behavior you've described, so I'll try to find someone from the LR Classic CC team to reach out to you.

[Alex Dixon]

Hi all,

I have a long-awaited update here.

On lightroom web we now have the ability to re-sort the custom sort order by several orders under the display options for sharing, as you can see in the screens below. We’ll also be looking at ways to provide sorting  options when you create shares in other client applications, as we’re not doing a good job of setting expectations now.





If you’re interested in the ability to “live sort”, please see this new thread: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/live-sort-options-in-shares.

We added the ability to add text & dividers for the layout for albums in October, and this functionality really requires a custom order (or a lot of complexity when you change sorts). 

Cheers,
Alex

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This "feature" is still exisiting but the workaround works well.

[Tomas TT]

Hello. All my clients see the photos I publish for them in order that makes no sense. I agree, it's a shame :'(

[paulpegg]

It was working just fine until the latest update. I use Lightroom CC Classic Publisher to upload albums to one of my websites. I always have a custom order and they were working fine until this week. Now, a new album is all jumbled up. I switched to oldest first but nothing happened. I am thinking about deleting the album and starting over.

[Tomas TT]

I've menaged to solve it out - if you modify/correct the order at "Lightroom web" then it appears correctly online.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Sooo, FRUSTRATING. The bug still persists in Spring 2021 (10.2 Release). bj_rn_schonhoff's workaround works well if all images have consecutive file names and same extensions. I wasn't able to get them to sort correctly by capture time (using the "custom order" workaround) when images come from different sources with different file names (SLR, Phones, Compact Camera). Which isn't often to be fair.

It also seems, that if you edit the collection/gallery online – via: Lightroom Classic CC, right-click collection-X/Lightroom Links/Private Link/View on Web – and fiddle around with it (change sorting in Gallery Settings rather than the bottom left menu item in the "overview bit") and delete images online while signed in, then they will, finally, sort correctly in the shared public gallery. But it's incredibly cumbersome and VERY time consuming and annoying. I have no idea if this is a really hard bug to fix – sometimes seemingly easy stuff takes forever to get right and complicated stuff turns out really easy to put right – or if you (yes you, Adobe) just don't think it's very important.

So, say I want to share images online sorted by capture date, oldest to newest.

Lightroom Classic CC – Images displayed in chosen sort order

"View on Web" via Private Link – Images displayed in chosen sort order

"View on Web" via Public Link – Images are displayed in WRONG sort order

Sort it! Please

[Arnie47]

After a while without this annoying sorting problem I had the same problem again yesterday.

The Images where sorted in a strange order in the public gallery.

I overcame the problem by switching to custom order in LR classic CC and for some reason the images there had the same order as in the public web gallery. So I manually sorted the images there in custom sort order (by dragging them quite cumbersomely to be sorted by date) and afterwards also the sort order in the public gallery was correct.

[TommyTT]

I have exactly the same problem and today when chatting to the Adobe support. With her help we realized the reason for the problem: The problem is created when syncing the pictures from Lr Classig to Lr Mobile. During that process they will get an upload time/ create time, but as Lr mobile sort them according to the capture date you will not see this problem until you create a web gallery. There they are presented in the same order as they were uploaded to Lr Mobile!

The work around is to update the sort order in the web gallery to capture date. 

As soon as the support representative and I understood the reason for the problem she said that this will be corrected soon!.

[trisweb2]

This still appears to be a problem as of today; I just uploaded a collection to the web and the sort order reflects the random upload order of the images, despite all attempts to change it. The shared gallery simply displays the photos in random order.

Incredible that the sorting issues have been going on for years and years in a paid service! This really needs attention and for a team to get the specifications straight and unit test the heck out of the expected outcomes. Please.

[trisweb2]

Nevermind, there is a difficult to find way to change the sort under the Web view. You need to click the artist's palette, then the "Expand" up caret on the hovering overlay button bar at the bottom, then the sort menu is available for the public view.

Can I make a new request?

Make this easier to find. Also default it to something other than "upload order." Or better yet, default it to the selected sort from any of the previous screens while viewing on the web. While I understand the desire to keep these separate for the share view and the working view, it's pretty hard to understand where the sort for the share view is coming from, so I still think it needs some improvement. Thanks!

[NYNC]

The Lightroom Web Gallery is a nice feature, but it has never ordered photos on the web or mobile version properly. When I use a custom order of photos in Lightroom Classic (V12.1 for Windows) on the desktop, the order in LR Mobile (iPad, OS V 16.3) or the Web Gallery does not match the desktop order. The only way to get the website to display in the desired order is to go to LR Mobile and arrange the sequence there. As I move photos around in LR Mobile, their order changes in LR Classic on the desktop to a different order. Should I then move the photos in the desktop back to their proper sequence on the desktop, the order on the web and LR Mobile would change to yet a different order. Shouldn't the Custom order on all three always be the same? I have brought this to Adobe's attention repeatedly for years, but they still haven't fixed this issue. Much extra work is required to get the order correct for clients when first setting up the website.  Then, if I subsequently tweak the content on the desktop version even slightly, I have to check the order on the web version and then go to the mobile version to fix any errant reordering. So disappointing that Adobe won't invest the time to fix this chronic bug in custom ordering.

[johnrellis]

"So disappointing that Adobe won't invest the time to fix this chronic bug in custom ordering."

Indeed. When the LR Cloud products were introduced five years ago, at the time Adobe announced there would be no more changes or improvements to sync between LR Classic and LR Cloud.  So it seems unlikely this will ever get fixed.

[Fernando Ortega]

STILL an issue. Going back to 2017. And we all give Adobe money every year. This is ridiculous.

[Jim Wilde]

I think the problem that Adobe might be having here is in trying to reliably reproduce any of the problems that have been reported in this thread. Speaking personally, I still see no issues at all in the syncing of Custom Order across my entire ecosystem, including LrC, so it would be no surprise to me if Adobe are having a problem in identifying and fixing the issues reported here.

I have tested and tested the Custom Order syncing over the years, but am yet to see any significant issue. I just tested again with the same collection/album open on 5 different apps (LrC, Lightroom desktop, LrM on iOS and iPadOS, LrWeb), and any change to the Custom Order in one app was quickly synced to all the others (usually less than a minute for the other 4 apps to update). In turn, I made changes in all the apps, but always allowing time for the change to sync before making another change in a diffeent app. I also reset the Custom Order using the facility on the Display tab in LrWeb, and that synced correctly as well.

I also added images to the collection from a couple of the apps, and the resulting behaviour was the same in all the other apps. One very minor issue appeared in this test....when adding new images to a collection/album, in Custom Order the new images are (logically) added at the end of the existing set of images and these new images are ordered in capture time, however the first image displayed in the series is actually what should be the last one in the series. A minor irritant, easily fixed by the user, but I'll report it to Adobe as well.

[NYNC]

You're among the lucky. Whether lucky few or lucky majority, I don't know. For me, and lots of others, this remains a consistent problem that has endured despite numerous Windows & iOS updates. My understanding is that Adobe has simply abandoned development and maintenance of web features linked to LR Classic and invests only in web features of the cloud version of LR with its very different client base. 

[Jim Wilde]

My understanding is slightly different to yours. What Adobe have said is that they will not add any NEW syncing functionality to Lightroom Classic, but they are continuing to support the existing sync functions. The recent 12.2.1 update, for example, was specifically to address a sync issue in LrC on the Windows platform.