Organising photos/files by date of creation

[EJHenn]

I have uploaded hundreds of photos from my iPhone, but Dropbox hasn't kept them in the order they were taken, i.e. the order they were on my phone. Please Dropbox, I need a way to sort by the date of creation, not the date of upload. Fingers crossed you can help with this very soon 🤞🙏

[Jay]

Hi @EJHenn, thanks for messaging the Community!

Did you upload the images manually to your Dropbox account, or via the automated camera upload feature?

This will help me to assist further!

[EJHenn]

Hello Jay,

I'm not sure, I think I just plugged in my phone, selected all my photos and manually uploaded.

[Jay]

Okay, so you physically connected the phone to your computer. How did you upload the files? 

Did you get a Dropbox prompt asking to upload your images using the Dropbox desktop application?

[EJHenn]

No, I connected my phone, opened Dropbox and clicked on Upload, selected files, then I selected all my photos and uploaded. Thank you so much for trying to help me with this.

[Jay]

Sorry, could you clarify where you 'opened Dropbox'? 

Did you open the Dropbox site and then upload the files, from your connected phone, to the site?

[EJHenn]

Hello Jay,

I opened Dropbox on my desktop (Chrome browser), connected my iPhone, clicked the Upload button, selected files, selected all my photos and uploaded.

Thanks so much for your continued help with this 🙂

[Jay]

Okay, so you manually uploaded the files to the site directly. This will affect the creation date of the files to make the dates appear to be the moment they were uploaded, since the file is technically being created at that point on the site.

If you want the original dates to be saved, you'd need to use the automatic camera upload feature on the phone, or the desktop app. 

[EJHenn]

OK, thanks Jay. I have just downloaded the Dropbox app to my Mac, so I won't have this problem moving forward. Problem is that once I uploaded the vast majority of my photos from my phone (using the manual option), I deleted them from my iCloud 😞  So is there any way Dropbox will be adding a feature at some point so that I can organise by creation date using the data from the images uploaded? 🙏

[Jay]

Depending on the images themselves, and metadata and EXIF data, you might be able to use the automation feature to rename the files using the 'Date captured' field stored in the image itself (if it's still present). 

I'd recommend testing this on a new, blank folder, and copy one or two images in there to see if they are renamed with the correct date.