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!

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

A couple of screenshots showing expected sort order on the various clients and a link to the gallery could help us diagnose what you are seeing.  Can you provide those?

[D2660]

Thank you.  Yes, here is the link to the public collection and two screen shots from Lightroom Desktop.  You will see from the screen shot that the first 11 photos in Lightroom desktop are sorted correctly from earliest to latest photos taken on a particular day.  The public collection shows these photos in reverse order.  Then the public collection starts showing the next days photos in the correct order except the order gets mixed up in other ways farther through the collection. 

In the second screen shot, there are pictures of my family in front of a tiger background.  The screen shots below are in the correct sequence.  The public collection mixes those photos up in no recognizable pattern. 

There are other anomalies to the public collection photo order, but this should give you a good idea of what is occurring.  The collection in Lightroom Desktop is sorted by ascending capture date.  Please let me know if anything else would help you.

Sincerely, Don


https://adobe.ly/2o7bq9K
 

[Alex Dixon]

Don -- it looks like what's happening is that there's a custom sort order applied in Lightroom Desktop, and we default to that ordering for share.

I believe that if you drag/drop re-order an image in Lightroom Desktop and then drag it back to where you want, that will "reset" the custom order to match what you want.

Let me know if that doesn't work and one of us will dig in a little further.

Cheers,
Alex

[D2660]

Hello,  I do not have a custom sort order in Lightroom Desktop.  Lightroom Desktop is set to sort by capture date in ascending order.   I have tried changing back and forth between sorting by name, by Custom, by ..., but nothing fixed the problem.   It always sorts correctly in Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Mobile but not in the public gallery.  The order of the photos in the public gallery seems to change randomly.  For example, I tried to show my wife the public link last night and it looked different than it looked when I created the screen shots for you. 

Sincerely, Don

[Alex Dixon]

Hi Don,

This is probably a little more info than you bargained for, but hopefully it'll help you understand what's going on here.

The sort order you have selected in Lightroom Desktop doesn't actually get synced to the share, so it won't matter which you have selected for what shows up in the share. It also look like there's a bug in Lightroom Desktop where custom order values are always written into the assets. On the share view on the web, we default to sorting by either custom order if it exists, or capture date descending (newest first) if that isn't set. But because the custom order is always getting set, we aren't hitting our fallback.

For now the easiest way to work around this is to view the photos in the order you want to default to in Lightroom Desktop, and then drag/drop an image to force the custom order to re-sort (then if you drag the image back it'll be custom ordered to that same order).
We're also investigating the custom order issues on Desktop, and looking into ways to improve the experience on web given this behavior. This is definitely not working as intended right now.
Let me know if you're able to get the default view updated, or if that's not taking.
Cheers,Alex

[D2660]

Hello Alex,

Thanks for the information.  It helped me understand what you were asking me to do.  I have never used "Custom" sort so it took a couple of tries, but that did temporarily resolve the problem.  My guess is that this will need to be redone periodically as I add photos to the collection but I haven't tested it yet.

I don't understand how the custom order values were set in the first place.  As I said, I have never used Custom sort or any sort feature and have always let my collections default to ascending capture date.  I had wanted to learn how to do custom sorts for slideshows but never took the time to figure it out.  I guess I learned something in the process.

My suggestion is to include an option to designate the sort order when making the collection public.  From the outside looking in, this seems reasonable and relatively easy because other options can be designated such as whether a user can download pictures.

Sincerely, Don

[Alex Dixon]

Glad to hear that helped (even if it's not ideal).

To be clear, the custom order values were set because of a bug on our side -- this was a surprise to me as well when I tested it.

Thanks for the additional feedback -- I'll be following up with our teams to see if we can improve the experience here. This definitely isn't the experience we intended.

Thanks,
Alex

[D2660]

That makes even more sense.  A bug in Lightroom caused the Custom order values to be set even though I had not set them previously.  Because the custom order values were set, the public gallery was sorted on the custom sort values instead of the sort order that was displayed in Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Mobile.  In my case, that was sort by ascending capture date. 

The temporary fix is to force the Custom order values to be reset to the same order as my desired order by (1) sorting the collection by ascending capture date (for my needs), then (2), dragging a photo out of the order to reset the custom order values, (3) then dragging that photo back to its correct order consistent with ascending capture date so that the custom order values match what I am trying to accomplish. 

Got it!  For me, understanding the details makes all the difference. 

Take care, Don

[Louie Sherwin]

This  happened to me as well after I added and deleted some images from a Lightroom Mobil shared collection.  On the public web view ll the images that I added ended up at end. 

The suggested workaround solved the problem for now.

-louie

[jabraham]

Thanks for the info. This is incredibly frustrating. I didn't see this thread with the proposed drag-n-drop fix, so instead I created a new public gallery and added my photos to it one-by-one in chronological order. 
It's great that you are working on improving the custom sort order in Desktop. However it would also be nice to be able to manually specify what sort order Lightroom Mobile should use (custom, date, filename, etc) in each collection, rather than defaulting to "custom" and falling back to "date".

Interestingly, reverse sort order on the Mobile public link seems to always be reverse capture date, even if the forward sort order is custom.

[danmundy]

The custom search order workaround isn't working for me...

Please fix this Adobe! So frustrating..

[jabraham]

Hey Dan try the workaround one more time. On your desktop sort your Lightroom Mobile collection by date. Drag one photo to a new location. Drag it back.

I found the instructions confusing. So, maybe my simpler instructions will help you.

[rawumber]

I ́ve got the same problem. public collection does not sort correctly... I can work aroun it by  using custom order but how long can it take to fix the sorting so you dont have to do various tricks to make it work?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

When I privately view the photos in an album they display correctly in chronological order; however, when I create a public link to the album, the photos displayed via the public link are in a different (non chronological order). They appear to be in the order I last edited them in Lightroom Classic. Further, when viewing the photos via the public link, I can click the sort order icon which displays the photos in reverse chronological order correctly, but when I click the link again the order is reversed to the original non-chronological order.

I have tried unsharing the album and then resharing the album but the problem remains. It seems that I cannot view the album in forward chronological order unless I view them privately. Can someone help with this issue? I would really like to share my album in the correct order.

[jabraham]

Hi Robin, yes, it is a bug.  You need to try the workaround.  In Desktop (Lightroom classic), sort by time.  Then drag one photo to a new location.  This sets a new custom order to be in chronological order except for the one photo.  Then, drag the one photo back to its correct location.  This sets the custom order to be the same as the chronological order.  It's a bug that should be fixed, but the workaround is easy.  You just need to use custom order, but set it to be the same as chronological order with two simple drags.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm having problems with the sort order in Shared Collections via Public Link: the photo order is just a mess. They seems to appear in the order in which the photos were added to the Shared Collection.

I'd like to keep them usually by Capture Time, sometimes in Custom Order.

But, currently they seem to be sorted by Added Order based not on when imported to Lightroom but when added to the Shared Collection.

It's a pain not to have control in which order a client sees the photos.

This has to change.

Give the photographer the possibility to control the order in which photos appear in Shared Collections via Public Link. At least let us choose by Capture Time.

Thanks.

Using Lightroom CC 2015.14 and Lightroom CC on iOS.

[jabraham]

@Anssi just follow the instructions above. Yes, it's a bug that should be fixed, but the workaround is quite simple.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

where should I drag it? If I drag it to another collection or album, the photo remains.

[D2660]

just drag the first picture between the second and third, and then drag it back to the first position. 

[shawnb71499088]

I’m having a related sorting problem that doesn’t appear to be fixed by this work-around. I’ve created an album with a custom order (using the mobile version), but that custom order doesn’t display properly when shared as a web gallery. Specifically, this is the behavior I’m seeing in the various flavors of Lightroom CC.

Mobile (iOS)

Custom order displays properly (not surprising as I created it in the mobile version)

Reverse order displays properly

Desktop (Mac OS 10.13.3)

Custom order displays properly

Reverse order displays properly

(My only complaint is that the desktop version doesn’t allow for any changes of the custom order)

Web Lightroom CC (Safari 11.0.3)

Custom order defaults to reverse order (but is otherwise correct)

Reverse order – there does not appear to be a way to reverse the order when in “Sort by custom order” mode (unlike “Sort by Capture Date” which has an arrow allowing the reverse switch)

Web Gallery (https://lightroom.adobe.com/shares/0e4e05b82a2540c9b33b1c3bf73b56b5)

The default view is the reverse of the custom order I set up.

Clicking on the “reverse order” icon (upper right corner) changes the order to “reverse chronological”, with the most recently capture photos at the top and the oldest at the bottom (and NOT in the custom order I created)

Clicking on the “reverse order” icon reverts to the “reversed custom” order originally present.

I’ve tried the suggested work-around (manually changing the custom order and then back again to ‘reset’ things), but nothing changed. This is a fairly substantial bug as sharing photos is a major feature of a cloud-based photo platform. This thread is now a year old with no permanent fix. How long will this continue?

[jabraham]

Hi @SCBaker this looks like a related but separate bug so please try to generate a support request for it, and start a separate thread here after you hear back.  Anyone else: can you confirm this?  Thanks for the detailed description.  I haven't adopted the CC version yet for my main workflow, but I agree this is an important item.

[shawnb71499088]

Good idea - I've now done that. I put it here based on suggestions from others to combine 'sorting issue' posts into this one. I'll update if I find anything (but I honestly don't have high hopes for support for a paid product that occurs exclusively through community forums - professional support from the software developers should be something that my monthly subscription goes towards).

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm finding it not useful that web defaults to capture date descending (newest first) as I'm sharing Collections for the assignments I've done and the client really should be looking the photos in a chronological order for ease of reviewing. It doesn't make sense for the client to review the photos in backwards as I'm mostly doing events, and I think any photo shoot is easier to review chronologically than last photo first.

I do find it useful, in some cases, some times, to be able having a custom order. But, there needs to be a bullet proof way for me to understand and trust the way the public web view is going to look like.

I need to be able to make the decisions in which way the photos will be presented. Otherwise it's a mess.

No one can work with a mess.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

John, thanks, I've missed the workaround. I've read like a hundred hours of post on Lightroom on this support forum and I feel like I've wasted so much time because of bugs and unexpected behaviour. Adobe now separating new LR CC and old LR CC Classic doesn't make support any easier.

I've just tried it, and the workaround seems to work – when I add a photo taken earlier than the rest of the photos in the Public Shared Collection, it goes to last but if in LR CC Classic do that reorder-then-back-to-what-sorting-by-capture-date-would-be it really does change the order of Public Shared Collection. Thanks!

But, this has been in progress for a year. How long should we be waiting for this kind of bug to be fixed? We're now on CC subscription world that was sold to us by having fixes and updates more often. I don't see it, and this proves it.

[jabraham]

Also I think you need to use LR CC Classic for this workaround to be effective. So, for those people using the new LR CC only (and not using classic) they’re going to be annoyed.