How to set the Albums in an iPhone in a specific order using Photoshop Elements

sorry Michel if I made myself not clear.
The problem exists on the iPhone. The way one uploads photos, organized in Albums is via iTunes. The nice thing about PSE and an iPhone is that the iPhone stored the images in Albums, the same Albums as used in PSE. Thus I have uploaded 100+ albums to my iPhone, but the order in which these albums appear on my iPhone is not alphabetically but in a seemingly random order. I can shuffle them around and set the order in a way I like, but the first time I update these albums from PSE on my PC, the order of albums as set by me is destroyed.
I've posted this problem also on an iPhone forum but there no one could help me....

If I understand well, the information about PSE albums, which is stored in the catalog database is read and translated by the Apple software into their own proprietary album format? As far as I know, the internal implementation of albums in the 'catalog.pseXXdb' database is still the same, a special flavour of tags with a sort order.

Hi Jack, 

I am editing my reply (below), as I ramble off the subject sometimes.   Sorry.   
Maybe I didn't quite understand.   You have a high number of albums on your phone that almost matches your high number of albums from your Mac.  My first thought was a storage solution, as your number of photo albums would be tough even for me to juggle on a phone.  Could you explain your system?   

Steve L.   

Hi Steve,
No, I don't want to use my phone as a storage place for pictures. I use my phone also as a photo album, showing family and friends pictures of holidays, family members, family gatherings, etc. 
The nice thing about iPhones is that the photo loader (iTunes) supports the album tag of PSE, so I can show pictures on my iPhone organized in PSE albums. Having about 25k images on my phone, searching a specific image becomes finding a needle in a haystack without the use of albums.
To show all pictures of, let's say, uncle Tom and myself I need to make an album of us both and upload that album to my iPhone. 
Having hundreds of albums in PSE, organized in categories and thus easily searchable, on the iPhone no categories are allowed. So one has hundreds of albums ordered in a long list to scroll thru. By manually rearranging them one can still group sequentially albums in order to find a certain album very fast. I have people alphabetically ordered in the first part of my list. Then I have holidays, then all kinds of themes I like to carry around with me and at last I have a group of albums about certain people as a group, such as all my kids together, me and my wife together, etc.
But each time one uploads or updates the photos using the iTune program, the ordered list of albums on the iPhone gets destroyed and one has to manually reorder the list which is a long and tedious shuffling.
That's my problem.
How can one save or keep the ordered list of albums on the iPhone? Which parameter or variable does the iOS use for ordering the list of albums in a particular order? 
I understand this is more an iPhone/Apple issue, but thought that more PSE users have the same problem and thus my chances of finding an answer here would be greater than on a iOS forum...... 

Jack,  this may or may not be a phone problem.  

If you keep a copy of your photos in the same organization or album, in a cloud, the cloud won't be updated, upgraded or reshuffled.  Rather than re-organize the album, I wonder if it is possible to pull down one album from the cloud to replace the album that was reshuffled.   Could that be possible?   This could also work with an external drive.  Also, new photos could be added to the album in the cloud then that could replace an entire album with new photos.   After an update in PSE, photos in a cloud shouldn't be effected if saved separately.   

I could buy more iCloud space to keep a copy of my pictures on my phone, but iCloud does not store the album tag, so it does not help me in this case.
I have copies of all my images on separate HDDs and thus need no extra copy in the Cloud.
I always have an iPhone with extended storage, last month I bought a new iPhone 7 Plus with 128GB storage capacity and thus I can store easily 25k images (average about 2MB and some panorama images of 15MB) on this phone (I could even have this amount of images on my previous 5S iPhone with 64GB, but then my phone was really full).

I'm not talking about an PSE update but an update of images in the albums. Let's say I come back from an holiday and thus, I organize all my new holiday pictures in a new album, f.i. "Paris_Nov2017". Then I want to add this album into my iPhone and thus I need to use the iTunes program to upload them into the phone. Then iTunes or the iOS will scramble my previously, nicely ordered list of albums on the phone into a new order of which I do not seem to have any influence. So my question is what parameter does the iPhone use to display the albums in a certain order.

For instance, the latest iOS, version 11 has two categories "Albums" and then "My Albums". The 'Albums' category includes albums named Camera Roll, People, Places, Selfies, Panoramas, My Photo Stream and Recently Deleted.
These special albums are fixed and cannot be shuffled in a different order.
The 'My Albums' have names that reflect their PSE name tag and when in edit mode can be moved and shuffled in a different display order. It is this order that iTunes destroys when I update the albums and pictures on the iPhone.  

ok gotchya.  So you need to use the fixed albums that do not shuffle?   Can you name albums under those fixed categories without them being shuffled?   If not, have you tried a tablet to make folders and would a tablet work better?   In my thinking, it seems another computer (a tablet) with a real HDD should keep the organization of albums (folders) intact.   

Jack,  

You know about Drop Box and it syncs apps together through its cloud, but could your album tags sync through Drop Box?   It should.  

Also, I'm a network guy and Michel knows the Organizer well.   I think you have two of the best here to help you resolve this problem.  

Whatever you figure out, there is another thread asking how to sync between an app and a mobile.  But stay here so we can resolve yours first.   Then you can give this guy your best answer.

The link is this:   
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/is-there-a-way-to-sync-the-mobile-and-compute...

I have an iPad (tablet) but that would rescind the purpose of having my album collection on my smartphone. But here too, it is iTunes that uploads the images into the tablet, thus duplicating the problem.
Building a PC based directory structure and then inserting in each directory the contents of the PSE albums is way too work-intensive to be an alternative.
Also I do not think SSD or HDD hardware has anything to do with it.
It is quite clear the fixed albums are hardwired into the iOS of the phone. What is needed here is the knowledge how the iPhone does set the order of the albums on the phone. It could be the creation date of the album inside PSE but this has to be first established. If this is the case, I could begin to create new albums inside PSE and upload these to the iPhone.
I will make some test albums in PSE, upload them to the iPhone and see how they are ordered.
Will keep you informed.

Jack,
Thanks for the follow-up, that's interesting.
I imagine it's very common for photographers to have a sophisticated catalog organization in their computers and to want to share and 'sync' on the Cloud selected files organized in 'albums'.
I don't think there is an ideal solution today for Elements users.
Most users would want better integration and syncing with Apple (iTunes) or Google (Photos).
There are other Cloud sharing solutions like Dropbox, OneDrive, my provider has another one... and I have maybe two other limited Cloud storage solutions!

Remember that the Adobe Revel was created to solve that need, and it failed in the purpose and was dropped.
Adobe clearly wants Elements user to go to Lightroom and mobile.

So, let me start with some very general statements for typical 'family' photographers using Elements.
- My local library is very big (big raw originals). It has sophisticated database organization. It does not rely on folders organization (mostly date based). Only a small amount of files need to be accessible from other devices or shared (keepers, recent events...) For me, the Cloud is not a global backup solution (external drives, other computer in other locations) but the selected files are safe there.
- I don't know other sharing solution offering fast searches by keywords. That means that an organization in folders, albums or collections is the best I can have on the Cloud.

So I can't avoid creating and managing a specific 'synced' folder on my desktop. I prefer Dropbox, but OneDrive would be good among others.
- That 'synced' folder is created from the organizer and its 'albums'.
- I select and organize events and subjects into albums from the organizer. I may rename the files according to custom sort order and downsize them if neccessary.
- I organize the synced folder tree in a common  folder tree for easier searches on the synced devices.
- since I always 'write metadata to files', the keywords are available for the Explorer, but that's not practical.

Michel,
On the side of PSE I have no problems whatsoever. One of the reasons I like PSE is its support of the iPhone iOS.
To be able to transfer images to your iPhone and have them organized in the same albums as on your PC is for me a boon! 
When you select Photoshop Elements in iTunes, all the albums in your PSE Collection are shown and you can select which albums you want to transfer. You can also select all albums (not an option for me with more than 160 albums and 50k photos....)
Thus I select the albums I want to have on my iPhone and with the help of iTunes this feat is accomplished with the push of one button!

Today I wanted to transfer a test album to my iPhone and behold, something did change in iTunes!
Suddenly I cannot select anymore albums but I am forced to transfer all photos and albums. The select albums radio button is greyed out!!!
I don't know if this is caused by the latest iTunes version 12.7 or/and the latest iOS which is now 11.1.2.
Anyway if this is the situation to be then Photoshop Elements (I have version 13, but I believe this is not of any importance which version one uses...) loses iOS/iTunes connectivity!!
I hope some Adobe engineers will look into this matter. I am at least most interested in solving this problem (even more than having the album order shuffled on my iPhone each time iTunes syncs my iPhone). And if this select album option is not anymore supported then the shuffling issue is anyway of no importance anymore...

Update:
I just connected my old and trusted iPad 4 to my PC and using iTunes 12.7.1.14 I got the same situation. Only All photos and albums radio button is selected and the Selected albums is greyed out.
As my iPad is still running on iOS 10.3.3. the culprit of this situation is therefore iTunes 12.7.
I'll try to roll back to an earlier version......
Will keep you updated.

Jack, 
This may lead into more problems as one turns into another still ahead.   I still say it is a cloud solution as I had mentioned, and then Michel had mentioned, may be your solution.  Don't expect Adobe to resolve this in an old version source code to new software.  There won't be a cloud sync built into PSE as long as 14 companies can serve that purpose.  This is a typical work-around solution.  Work it out, plant your tags if you can, or not.  The best work-around is one that can serve others in the future as others in forums who have the same problem (and I don't see that now) and if there are, you can serve as an expert with solid answers.  Right now, your solutions are not solid.   

This reminds me of an old poem by Charles Dickens (I know I am so boring) - 
"...people talking to people, who are talking to other people, who are talking..."  
It went on, but it was to say, people drive themselves mad with over-tasking. 
This becomes a problem that becomes another problem, becoming another.  

You can either drive yourself nuts over it, or you can find a solution, but if you cannot find a solution, it's time to save your brain power for something better.   

Update:
I just connected my old and trusted iPad 4 to my PC and using iTunes 12.7.1.14 I got the same situation. Only All photos and albums radio button is selected and the Selected albums is greyed out.
As my iPad is still running on iOS 10.3.3. the culprit of this situation is therefore iTunes 12.7.
I'll try to roll back to an earlier version......
Will keep you updated.

It turned out to be an iOS problem that with the latest update 11.2 (that became available tonight) has been resolved.

Hi Michel,
Yes, it's not PSE that supports iTunes but the opposite. Sorry for not making this crystal clear.
Indeed, my problem is only with iOS, iPhone and iTunes. But because I haven't gotten any answers on Apple forums, I thought maybe here on PSE forum I might run into an user that could assist me with my specific problem.
I've tried to downgrade my iTune version, using all the tricks in my book that comprises 40 years of computer knowledge, but to no avail. Couldn't get an earlier version of iTunes installed on my rig.
I hate to turn to Dropbox and start manually building a PSE-album based directory structure and then copy in each directory the images. A big drawback is that Dropbox does not display images as thumbnails on the iPhone, making swiping and searching for a certain image impossible. 
I'll try also to use the "all albums" option in iTunes and see if this is at all feasible.
Well, I have to find some answers in the Apple world. Wish me luck.......

This bug has been solved by the latest iOS 11.2 (became available last night) and I can now select which albums I like to transfer to my iPhone.
 
Seems the culprit was the last update of iTunes, but because this bug is so specific to PSE users transferring albums to their iPhone, Apple did not list it in their fix-list...

Update: Problem solved by updating the phone firmware with iOS 11.2.
Seems the culprit was the last update of iTunes, but because this bug is so specific to PSE users transferring albums to their iPhone, Apple did not list it in their fix-list...

Good news!

I agree with Michel,  good news.   

I had shown this before, as you may have missed.  Adobe has another thread where two people are talking about your same problem.   Ask them how successful it was for them.   Also, one is saying something about Light Room that this happens with Light Room Ecosystem.  Look for them at this link.  
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/screenshot-function-automatically-copies-imag...

Steve,
I can't fathom how this thread can possibly be connected to my problem. Please elaborate.