Upload window not matching image order in folder

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Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website, Windows 10

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): N/A

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: N/A

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: I have a set of photos from yesterday that I made on my phone and backed up to the Cloud on Google Photos. I downloaded them from Photos and then extracted the zipped file, giving me a list of 200+ observations. I was then able to sort them by name (20230521_124528, 20230521_124751) so it gives a list of all observations sorted by the time I took the image from beginning of the day to the end. The phone auto-names by date so the names give a precise sequence of photos and when they were taken

Step 2: Go on the Upload screen on the website to upload a batch of photos. Click “upload” and the window pops up on the Windows screen to choose the files to upload. I choose the file folder that my extracted photos are held.

Step 3: ALL the photos are now out of order as I had sorted before I even went on iNat. So I will have a photo of one specimen as the third photo and the second image of the same specimen will be like the 14th photo, despite them being taken in sequence. There are NO options on the “choose photos to upload” window to be able to sort the pictures back to the order in which they were taken. Does anyone know how to get the iNat uploader to upload in the same sequence as you would view the folder on your computer?

This seems trivial but I have thumbnails that are clearly plants but are too small too see if there are 3-4 views of the same plant, and if all these 3-4 images of the same plant are widely out of order, I have a very difficult time combining the observations into one, or even telling if this photo of a maple is the same as a photo of another maple. The only thing clueing me to this association is the ORDER of the photos on my hard drive. I have no clue why the photos on the iNat upload popup screen are all out of order as to file name? It makes organizing my uploads much more tedious and prone to error.

Thanks

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This is a known issue, and I’ve reported on an aspect of it a few years ago:

The overall response is, “Deal with it.”

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drag and drop your photos individually to the upload screen in the sequence that you want to see them on the upload screen.

I guess that will have to work. It’s just odd because I can download and sort in the order they should be on my computer but when I want to upload they don’t display them in the same order. Seems odd for the computer to mix the images up, like an unnecessary change to make