Synced Photo folder/album behaviour

[toughnut]

In previous iOS iteration, I have multiple folders on my computer synced to iPhone and the Photos app captured all the folder/album properly. Work, personnel, info etc etc.

However for iOS 12, seem like everything lumped in Photos tab (same as previous iOS 11 and before) but no folders shown on Albums tab. Anyway to make all the album/folder to show?

 

[sbcdk]

Very good question. I just noticed the same problem.

I sync around 9.000 photos and videos onto my iPhone. That is the reason why I bought the 256gb X. But now all folders are ignored and they are just a huge and uncontrolable mess. I doubt this is a bug, but rather Apple experimenting with a new way of (dis)organizing photos. Hope this is changed back soon...

 

[Czo]

In previous iOS iteration, I have multiple folders on my computer synced to iPhone and the Photos app captured all the folder/album properly. Work, personnel, info etc etc.

However for iOS 12, seem like everything lumped in Photos tab (same as previous iOS 11 and before) but no folders shown on Albums tab. Anyway to make all the album/folder to show?

It's still not changed in beta 2

 

[sbcdk]

I have found a workaround. Lets say you have a synced folder named France. Create a new folder in the photos app with the same name. Switch to Search tab and type France. Now the hidden France folder you synced is shown. Select all files from it and copy them to the newly created France folder. Et voila!

Let’s hope they fix this soon, but the above works for now...

 

[MEJHarrison]

That sucks that it's broke. Hopefully they'll get it fixed again.

However, I have just over 30,000 photos in my library now and I had to give up folder organization years back. I just kept running into "should this go in the Christmas folder? The Mom folder? The Chris folder? The Daniel folder? The Funny folder? The whatever folder?". Once I added keywords to all my photos, photo management became considerably easier. Of course you can't add keywords to photos on iOS, you need a Mac or PC for that (unless there's some app I don't know about). So if you just have a phone and/or tablet, it's a lot harder, if not impossible. But if you have the ability, I highly recommend reconsidering how you organize your media. It makes finding photos much easier in my opinion. In the example I mentioned earlier, I don't need to search through a half-dozen folders. I could just search for "Christmas, Mom" which normally narrows it down enough to find what I'm after. If I find what I'm after, I can even scroll up from the photo and click on "Show Photos from this Day" at the bottom to see the rest of the photos I took at that time.

That system won't be for everyone of course. Some people will never give up their folders, and that's fine for them. I just wanted to mention another possible option for those who haven't considered it before.

 

[4492865]

In previous iOS iteration, I have multiple folders on my computer synced to iPhone and the Photos app captured all the folder/album properly. Work, personnel, info etc etc.

However for iOS 12, seem like everything lumped in Photos tab (same as previous iOS 11 and before) but no folders shown on Albums tab. Anyway to make all the album/folder to show?

Did you sync them using iTunes or iCloud? I hope iOS12 doesn't remove iCloud Photo Library folders?

 

[Dukat]

I’m having the same issue, incredibly irritating.

I noticed that when I connect to my photos library via Transfer Pro app it sees the folders(album) structure from the sync so they still exist on the phone but the Photos app no longer displays them.

I have over 40GB of Photos organized in ~50 folders so manual approach to fix it won’t work, especially when it will happen again next time I need to do a fresh full sync.

Considered switching to Dropbox or OneDrive to store my photos the way I want them organized but apps like SnapSeed can’t access photos from cloud services for editing directly so 3rd part solutions won’t work well.

Hopefully this is a bug that gets fixed quickly. I don’t understand Apples obsession with making it impossible to organize anything properly.

If they want to dumb it down offer that as an option but let us create folders/s albums from a PC sync... and why did they remove the ability to create sub-albums a few years back?

I used to be able to make a folder ‘Trips’ and sub folders like Trips\Italy, Trips\France, etc.. I believe that ability vanished around iOS 10.

 

[sbcdk]

Synced albums are back, in beta 3

It says “From my Mac”, even though it is from a pc, but who cares?

 

[Dukat]

Synced albums are back, in beta 3

It says “From my Mac”, even though it is from a pc, but who cares?

Awesome, thanks.
Now I have to wait for the public release.

 

[marianojhb]

hello. seems a little old this thread. I was wondering if this was resolved. I had stopped using iCloud, then want to syncronize >10.000 photos with folder/album organization into iPhone, as I have a 256GB XS, but it seems folder are not shown. All albums are below "From My Mac", and at the same level: no folder at all. Is this behaviour correct? How can I load even more photos and have them organised in folders, not only albums? Thank you