Google Photos Chronology Problem

[Stevo985]

Morning chaps.

I use Google Photos to browse the photos I take on my phone, as I'm sure a lot of us here do.
I have them sorted by date which I find is the most convenient. If I'm looking for photos from my holiday to Thailand I can immediately scroll to July 2014 and there they are.

 

However, I did a factory reset on my phone in May, and when I went back into Google Photos after that and restored all my photos from backup, the vast majority of my photos now appeared as being taken on that day in May. 
Everything I've taken since then has worked as you'd expect, but most photos before that date are all dumped in that one day in May. 
So to find any photo before May 2017 I have to trawl through that mass of photos. And they're in a random order too, which makes it even harder.

 

However, if I view one photo and look at the info (hit the i symbol) then it displays a taken or a created date and THAT date is correct. So again using Thailand as an example. Photos would sort a thailand photo into May 2017, but when I viewed the details it would tell me it was taken in July 2014.

 

I've googled the **** out of this and can't find an answer. Does anyone know if there's a way to restore the correct order? It seems like a pretty major flaw if a factory reset just **** up your entire photo library

 

Edit: I've cleared App data and cache and still get the same results. Also I'm sure this has happened before with a different date when I factory reset previously, so I don't think another reset would fix it.

Edited August 4, 2017 by Stevo985

[Davkaus]

Possibly not the answer you want, but I'd try another photo app. Google doesn't give a shit about letting you change sorting, and if it goes wrong, you're screwed. It's the only photo app I've ever seen that doesn't let you change the sort order.

They used to make good software that let you customise things, now if you don't want it their way, it's tough luck.

You could leave Google Photos active just to keep your files synced to the cloud for backup, but use another app to actually view and manage them.

Edited August 4, 2017 by Davkaus

[Stevo985]

14 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Possibly not the answer you want, but I'd try another photo app. Google doesn't give a shit about letting you change sorting, and if it goes wrong, you're screwed. It's the only photo app I've ever seen that doesn't let you change the sort order.

They used to make good software that let you customise things, now if you don't want it their way, it's tough luck.

You could leave Google Photos active just to keep your files synced to the cloud for backup, but use another app to actually view and manage them.

It's crossed my mind, but very few photos are now on my device, I mostly view them from the cloud.

So to use another app would I have to download every photo, or is there something that would integrate with Google?

[limpid]

I don't think I understand. What do you mean by "restored all my photos". What did you do to restore them? You just open Google Photos and there they are. If you manually got them onto your phone on that date then Photos would have seen them as new images on that date and uploaded them all again. What did you actually do?

Also, I use assistant in photos to create albums. It's much easier to manage photos than by sorting them.

[Stevo985]

6 hours ago, limpid said:

I don't think I understand. What do you mean by "restored all my photos". What did you do to restore them? You just open Google Photos and there they are. If you manually got them onto your phone on that date then Photos would have seen them as new images on that date and uploaded them all again. What did you actually do?

Also, I use assistant in photos to create albums. It's much easier to manage photos than by sorting them.

Yeah I didn't explain that very well.

I didn't restore them. None of them are on my device, except for the ones I've taken since. 

I just meant you open Photos and it's blank and then it syncs to your account and all the photos are there. Except for me they're in the wrong order.

 

I've just checked photos on my chromebook and on there they're in the right order. So it would suggest it's a problem with my phone.

I do create albums for some things, but not everything. Part of the reason I was looking back through photos was to put them all into albums so I could find stuff easier  

[DCJonah]

16 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Yeah I didn't explain that very well.

I didn't restore them. None of them are on my device, except for the ones I've taken since. 

I just meant you open Photos and it's blank and then it syncs to your account and all the photos are there. Except for me they're in the wrong order.

 

I've just checked photos on my chromebook and on there they're in the right order. So it would suggest it's a problem with my phone.

I do create albums for some things, but not everything. Part of the reason I was looking back through photos was to put them all into albums so I could find stuff easier  

Just a shot in the dark, but are these photos you've received through WhatsApp or maybe another app?

If so, the same thing happened to me when I replaced my phone. I restored my WhatsApp from backup, and my phone saw all the photos coming through on that day, so it displays them that way.

If I look at my 'Photos' account on my computer though, it sorts the photos correctly.

I spent a long time Googling it but couldn't find an answer.

[Stevo985]

3 hours ago, DCJonah said:

Just a shot in the dark, but are these photos you've received through WhatsApp or maybe another app?

If so, the same thing happened to me when I replaced my phone. I restored my WhatsApp from backup, and my phone saw all the photos coming through on that day, so it displays them that way.

If I look at my 'Photos' account on my computer though, it sorts the photos correctly.

I spent a long time Googling it but couldn't find an answer.

They're from everywhere. Some are WhatsApp, some are photos I've taken, some are downloads etc etc