Dropbox photos not staying 100% in chronological order

[li123]

Hi! Basically, it's exactly what the title says. It's got nothing to do with the date I uploaded the pictures, but the file names themselves. For example, I've been scanning, cataloguing and organising my mum's old wedding photos (actual photos on paper from 30 years ago) and before I uploaded them, when I saved the scanned files, I gave them chronological order names with the event,  date (year-month-day) and then appendix numbers. E.g Mum's wedding 1991-05-26 0001, 0002, etc. But they won't stay in chronological order in the Dropbox folder they're in. I have them in chronological order up to #40. Then it jumps to #100-160 (in chronological order) then goes back to 41, 42 etc (again in chronological order). 

My normal digital pics are even worse for this. For example, when I search DSC 025 I get DSC 0250, then DSC 0255, then 0256, then 0252, then 0257, then 0254, then 0251, 0253 and 0259. I just want them in the right order and stay like that. This might be a simple case of setting it to organise by name but I'm unable to do that; I can see group by relevance and last modified when I search and when I got to the specific folder where my mum's wedding pics are it's set to organise by name but I still get that situation of half chronological and half not (those are TIFF files compared to my digital pics being in JPG but not sure that matters)

[BernadetteMadden]

Thank you...but I think we both know that adding a number to each image when there are over 26,000 is not a realistic solution to my problem. 

[Jay]

While there isn't a feature to rename files using Dropbox itself, there are other apps and services which could automatically batch rename the files for you, including built-in features in Mac OS. 

[BernadetteMadden]

I don't want to have to rename files, just keep the dates and times that the photos were taken and sort them that way.The data is still on the images, Dropbox just isn't reading it.  If this can't be done in Dropbox please let me know.Or if you know of another app that will enable Dropbox to do this could you let me know that too please. 

[Jay]

It wouldn't be possible to sort the images on the Dropbox site by creation date.

The only sorting options on the site are by name, modification date. number of invited members, type of file, file extension, and finally the size of the file.

[BernadetteMadden]

Thank you for finally giving me  a straight answer to my question. I'm sorry that Dropbox can't sort by the original date the image was taken, as it means I will no longer be able to use it. I notice that there a lot of people out there who also file their images in that way so perhaps Dropbox might consider adding it to their 'sort by ' choices.

[Jay]

If you wish, you can suggest this change for others to vote on, so the dev team can look into this in future!

[BrianP]

Dear Jay at Dropbox. This has to be the most life-wasting reply I've ever read. How long do you think it would take a human being to put numerically chronological digits in front of Apple's weird file naming system (presumably done as an encryptive method to defy people using non-Apple softwares?)

I have a similar dilemma as I am trying to get my daughter's holiday snaps from her iPhone into a Dropbox folder of our choice. She doesn't have sufficient memory left on her Laptop PC to do this in one go so we are attempting to find an alternative approach. Please assist. It is the .jpeg files that are the major issue - the .jpg files are seemingly okay as they are titled in the format of :

" Photo date, timestamp "

whereas the .jpeg files have the weird (Apple?) format of :

a random mix of upper case letters & numbers in the following sequences:

" 8 DIGITS-4DIGITS-4DIGITS-4DIGITS-12DIGITS"

[Hannah]

Hey @BrianP, thanks for your feedback here.

Have you tried manually uploading the photos through the (+) icon in the Dropbox app?

The 8 DIGITS-4DIGITS-4DIGITS-4DIGITS-12DIGITS format shouldn't appear when the images are uploaded to Dropbox.

[BernadetteMadden]

I have over 50,000 photos at the moment ,so, NO.....manually uploading is not the answer