date order in large galleries

Elaine

Not sure if I should post here or ask help desk...

I almost always prefer to order my photos by date in my galleries. I've noticed that sometimes, it seems in large galleries especially, the date order function messes up. I have a large gallery of baseball photos (371 photos).
There are many sequences of a pitcher and many of these are out of order, which just looks bad, IMO. If I change the auto sort to "none" so I can manually order them by number, I'm afraid it will first jumble them even more than they already are and then I'll have to manually number nearly 400 photos. Yuck. (It seems that when I've tried this before, I would correct a few and then others which had been correct ended up out of order, so I ended up having to do basically the whole thing.)
Is this a known issue? Is it a fault of being too large of a gallery? Any ideas for dealing with it?

PS - It looks like the trouble starts on page 5 of the gallery.
EDIT - Actually, I found one error on page 3, too.

jfriend

If you're talking about rapid fps sequences of photos that don't sort properly, that is very common. It's generally because the EXIF standard for recording the time/date of the shot doesn't contain enough precision to tell the difference between the time shot for shots in a fast sequence. Thus, the order is not always correct. This is not a Smugmug problem, but a limitation in the information present in the EXIF standard.

To work around it, I leave the original filename as they came out of the camera and I sort by the original filename and that puts them in the order taken, even in fast sequences. I sure hope the camera makers plan on fixing this sometime.

If you want to manually fix the ones that are off, here's what you can do:

1. Turn auto-sort off in Gallery Settings. This may temporarily give you a jumbled order in the gallery.
2. Go to the Tools menu and select Tools/Many Photos/Arrange Sort.
3. In the resulting screen, select the date taken order. This will do a one time sort based on date taken and put them back in the same order as you saw them with auto-sort, but you are now free to manually fix the few that are off.
4. You can now manually fix just the few sequences that are off.

Elaine

jfriend wrote:

If you're talking about rapid fps sequences of photos that don't sort properly, that is very common. It's generally because the EXIF standard for recording the time/date of the shot doesn't contain enough precision to tell the difference between the time shot for shots in a fast sequence. Thus, the order is not always correct. This is not a Smugmug problem, but a limitation in the information present in the EXIF standard.

To work around it, I leave the original filename as they came out of the camera and I sort by the original filename and that puts them in the order taken, even in fast sequences. I sure hope the camera makers plan on fixing this sometime.

If you want to manually fix the ones that are off, here's what you can do:

1. Turn auto-sort off in Gallery Settings. This may temporarily give you a jumbled order in the gallery.
2. Go to the Tools menu and select Tools/Many Photos/Arrange Sort.
3. In the resulting screen, select the date taken order. This will do a one time sort based on date taken and put them back in the same order as you saw them with auto-sort, but you are now free to manually fix the few that are off.
4. You can now manually fix just the few sequences that are off.

Great! Thank you very much for clarifying this issue and giving me a solution!

BigAl

jfriend wrote:

To work around it, I leave the original filename as they came out of the camera and I sort by the original filename and that puts them in the order taken, even in fast sequences. I sure hope the camera makers plan on fixing this sometime.

If you want to manually fix the ones that are off, here's what you can do:

1. Turn auto-sort off in Gallery Settings. This may temporarily give you a jumbled order in the gallery.
2. Go to the Tools menu and select Tools/Many Photos/Arrange Sort.
3. In the resulting screen, select the date taken order. This will do a one time sort based on date taken and put them back in the same order as you saw them with auto-sort, but you are now free to manually fix the few that are off.
4. You can now manually fix just the few sequences that are off.

Thanks for this John. I wanted to sort the pics by filename, so gave them names like xxx-001, xxx-002. Then I wanted to add pics between 001 and 002 so gave them names xxx-001-a, xxx-001-b. What the auto sort did was to put the xxx-001-y ahead of xxx-001 (can't figure out why it should do that). With your method I could move xxx-001 ahead of the others.

kyungl

Jumbling seems reversed, not random
I just started shooting football games, so I hadn't run into this phenomenon until now. I use two cameras, and I occasionally bring along a second shooter, so sorting by filename is not an option. I'm currently sorting by date taken and leave my original Canon IMG_XXXX filenames intact.

It seems to me that the images taken in the same second simply sort in reverse filename order--could this be reversed in programming? or is it possible to incorporate a secondary sort by filename when encountering multiple files with the same hr/min/sec stamp?

jfriend

kyungl wrote: »

I just started shooting football games, so I hadn't run into this phenomenon until now. I use two cameras, and I occasionally bring along a second shooter, so sorting by filename is not an option. I'm currently sorting by date taken and leave my original Canon IMG_XXXX filenames intact.

It seems to me that the images taken in the same second simply sort in reverse filename order--could this be reversed in programming? or is it possible to incorporate a secondary sort by filename when encountering multiple files with the same hr/min/sec stamp?

The only way I found to control that was to embed the full time and filenumber in the filename and sort by filename. So, I have a filename like this:

Rowing-20110508122836_0314.JPG

"Rowing" is just a moniker that identifies the subject matter to me and is the same on all files that I wish to sort together.

"20110508122836" is the EXIF date/time.

"0314" is the file number out of the camera.

The EXIF date/time is the primary sort. The filenumber is the secondary sort (which only matters when the date/time is exactly the same between two images). So, any images with the same EXIF date/time get sorted by filenumber which gets everything into true chronological order.

I do this file renaming automatically in Lightroom when I pull the images off the card, but it's also easy to do it later in the process if needed. This process works for multiple cameras as long as you sync the clocks on all the cameras.

You have to do the file renaming before uploading to Smugmug. I also sometimes have galleries that I want to sort by rating. In that case, I put the rating into the filename too which means I rename the exported JPEGS upon export from LR according to their rating.