P: Web: Public Gallery not sorting correctly

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.

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. 

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.

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

"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.

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.

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!

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.

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!.

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.