Takeout JSON

Why Do My Photos Look Shuffled in Google Drive?

Drive sorts by upload time or by name, not by when the photo was taken.

Google Drive is a file store, not a photo app. It sorts by name or by the time the file was added, and neither has anything to do with when the picture was taken.

Uploading a folder in one go gives everything nearly the same upload time, so the order falls back to filenames. Names like IMG_2841 and DSC_0032 from different cameras interleave into nonsense.

Putting the date at the front of each filename fixes it everywhere at once, in Drive and in any other system. Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer renames by the real capture date, so the names themselves sort correctly.