How to sort photos and videos in the Photos app on iPhone and iPad

Learn how to use the sorting feature of the Apple Photos app to quickly sort images and videos by date or custom order in your iPhone and iPad library.

Sort Photos in Album iPad

You can sort a couple of different ways in Photos within your Shared Albums and albums you create. This is a terrific feature, and if you did not know about it, you have come to the right place.

Where you can sort

As mentioned, you can sort photos and videos in your albums. This includes Shared Albums and those you make for yourself.

The other areas in Photos do not offer the sorting option. This includes premade collections like Favorites and Recents, utilities like Imports and Recently Deleted, and all of the folders within Media Types.

The sole purpose is to give you a way to sort the items in your albums.

How to sort photos on iPhone and iPad

1) Open the Photos app and go inside an album other than Recents or Favorites.

2) Tap the three dots button in the top right corner of the album and choose Sort.

3) Select your sort option:

  • You can pick from Oldest to Newest or Newest to Oldest.
  • In the albums you’ve created, you can also choose Custom Order, which is basically your manual sorting.
  • In Shared Albums, you can also choose Date Added.
Sort photos and videos on iPhone

Note that Custom Order and Date Added are the default sort orders for these types of albums.

And that’s all there is to the automatic sort feature in Photos! It takes only a few seconds to arrange your items in the order you’d like them.

Manual sorting

You can also rearrange the photos manually in the albums you have created. As mentioned, this won’t work for places like Recents, Favorites, or Shared Albums.

Here’s how to manually sort pictures and videos on iPhone and iPad:

1) Open the Photos app and go inside an album you’ve created.

2) Touch & hold a photo or video thumbnail. Now drag & drop it to another spot.

3) You can repeat this process for all other photos and videos.

Manually sorting photos and videos on iPhone

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