An anonymous Hints reader was flummoxed: He (or she) used iTunes to sync pictures from iPhoto to his (or her) iPhone. But when he looked at the pictures on his phone, iPhoto Events didn’t appear in the order he wanted. As far as he could tell, neither iTunes nor the iPhone offered any option to change the phone’s photo-sorting behavior.
As the anonymous reader discovered, however, there is a solution—one that’s less obvious than it might appear at first. The iPhone will honor whichever sorting option you select within iPhoto. To change the sorting order there, launch iPhoto, select Events, and then choose View -> Sort Events. You can then sort Events by date (in chronological or reverse-chronological order), alphabetically by name, or in a manual order of your own creation.
But, wait, there’s more: If you switched to iTunes now, your photos still wouldn’t be in the order you wanted; they’d be out of order on your phone, too. You must first quit and relaunch iPhoto. Once you’ve done so, iTunes will notice the new sort order you’ve set for your Events. When you sync your iPhone this time, events will appear the way you want them to.
Author: Lex Friedman, Senior Contributor
Lex is a former writer for Macworld. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three kids.