Very upset and damaging my business/confusing customers (file numbering)

zeroone

So ive only just notcied that smugmug despite having a setting that allows you to have your photos in file name order, ie image1, image2 etc what ive witnessed is that it doesnt actually put them in correct order! images are sometimes in perfect order, but 90% of the time you will get say image 11 before image 10!

THough its not hard to work around etc, some customers of mine that use smugmug (its our client area for photoshoots) are confused and order the wrong prints! (they count where the image is rarther than by file name)

Ive set the global settings etc to list by number order but it only works on a handful of files a hand full of times. This is not acceptable and its a major annoyance to go through 2000+ images making sure they are in order.

Disgusting, what is happening? it should be simple, its a PAID service and a feature that SHOULD work, why in the name of hell does it not?

zeroone

zeroone wrote: »

So ive only just notcied that smugmug despite having a setting that allows you to have your photos in file name order, ie image1, image2 etc what ive witnessed is that it doesnt actually put them in correct order! images are sometimes in perfect order, but 90% of the time you will get say image 11 before image 10!

THough its not hard to work around etc, some customers of mine that use smugmug (its our client area for photoshoots) are confused and order the wrong prints! (they count where the image is rarther than by file name)

Ive set the global settings etc to list by number order but it only works on a handful of files a hand full of times. This is not acceptable and its a major annoyance to go through 2000+ images making sure they are in order.

Disgusting, what is happening? it should be simple, its a PAID service and a feature that SHOULD work, why in the name of hell does it not?

Ok im now fuming, ive made it a mutiple setting now for all galleries and the images are now ALL going: Image 1 then Image 10!

This has RUINED every one of my galleries, what a TOTAL joke! Do places like zenfolio have this stupid issue? im sure they dont, what a total waste of my time and money!

daylightimages

zeroone wrote: »

This has RUINED every one of my galleries, what a TOTAL joke! Do places like zenfolio have this stupid issue? im sure they dont, what a total waste of my time and money!

You're running into a very common issue with computerized numbering systems. Computers sort character by character, so when a computer sorts photos it goes like this:

IMG1 (which it reads as I-M-G-1-nothing)
IMG10 (which it reads as I-M-G-1-0 and since 0 comes after "nothing" it puts it after IMG1)
IMG2 (which it reads as I-M-G-2 -- since the fourth character is a 2, anything with a fourth character of 1 will come ahead of it)

Thus, images 1-20 will be sorted IMG1, IMG10, IMG11...IMG19, IMG2, IMG20.

Solution? Use the same number of characters for all file names and use leading zeros. IMG0001, IMG0010, etc.

This isn't a SmugMug issue -- it's the way all data is sorted in the computer world.

zeroone

daylightimages wrote: »

You're running into a very common issue with computerized numbering systems. Computers sort character by character, so when a computer sorts photos it goes like this:

IMG1 (which it reads as I-M-G-1-nothing)
IMG10 (which it reads as I-M-G-1-0 and since 0 comes after "nothing" it puts it after IMG1)
IMG2 (which it reads as I-M-G-2 -- since the fourth character is a 2, anything with a fourth character of 1 will come ahead of it)

Thus, images 1-20 will be sorted IMG1, IMG10, IMG11...IMG19, IMG2, IMG20.

Solution? Use the same number of characters for all file names and use leading zeros. IMG0001, IMG0010, etc.

This isn't a SmugMug issue -- it's the way all data is sorted in the computer world.

I see what youre saying though ive had friends use zenfolio with the same numbering convention and not get this issue? are they just special, ie different to the entire internet?

It also doesnt explain why some images do this: image 11, image 13, image 12

what the hell?

also whats made my night is a huge message to their support which failed to send and loosing all the message AND i cant upload a a single file anymore, uploader is down?? i cannot beleive this has happened, genuinly this is the worst experience ive had with any company, ive had!

Allen

zeroone wrote: »

I see what youre saying though ive had friends use zenfolio with the same numbering convention and not get this issue? are they just special, ie different to the entire internet?

It also doesnt explain why some images do this: image 11, image 13, image 12

what the hell?

also whats made my night is a huge message to their support which failed to send and loosing all the message AND i cant upload a a single file anymore, uploader is down?? i cannot beleive this has happened, genuinly this is the worst experience ive had with any company, ive had!

Sort the photos by date taken and they should fall in order.

zeroone

Allen wrote: »

Sort the photos by date taken and they should fall in order.

i thought of that, they messed up even worse! the mind truly boggles. Ive tried everything you can think of. Whats more now thogh is that i cannot even upload a single image to a gallery, it just fails everytime, even tteeeeenny files.

Ive had enough!

Allen

zeroone wrote: »

i thought of that, they messed up even worse! the mind truly boggles. Ive tried everything you can think of. Whats more now thogh is that i cannot even upload a single image to a gallery, it just fails everytime, even tteeeeenny files.

Ive had enough!

Might be an issue with the net at the moment, Amazon is having hiccups. Wait a bit and try again.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=201619

Is the EXIF attached to your photos? Date taken ascending should work.

SamirD

I'm having upload issues as well. :cry

As far as the file ordering, are the images consecutive and taken in burst? This is a common issue when sorted in date order as there is no way for it to distinguish from two files taken in the same second.

Now, if it's purely a sort issue like image12 and image13, this is very odd, and I've never run into it even though I have over 400,000 images online with SM and all sorted by file name, which are just conseqcutive straight out of the camera.

zeroone

SamirD wrote: »

I'm having upload issues as well. :cry

As far as the file ordering, are the images consecutive and taken in burst? This is a common issue when sorted in date order as there is no way for it to distinguish from two files taken in the same second.

Now, if it's purely a sort issue like image12 and image13, this is very odd, and I've never run into it even though I have over 400,000 images online with SM and all sorted by file name, which are just conseqcutive straight out of the camera.

The files are out of te camera as 001, 002 etc in raw form. I then remove the files that are not good/i dont like and rename the files to be Image1, Image2 etc.

Windows recognises it fine.

When i upload here the files often go like this: Image1, Image3, Image4, image2, Image6, Image5....

Then in order for about 10 pics, then a similar pattern repeats above.

If from now i upload images, i keep it as 001, 002, 003... it should be ok? no matter what i tell the file system order to be on here it NEVER puts them in the correct order, not once, not ever.

rainforest1155

Hi,

Yes, the problem comes up if you number photos 1,10,11,100 etc. While Windows may still display the photos in the correct order, it's not something supported universally.
As others have suggested before, the only way to universally have your photos sort properly by filename at all times, is by using leading 0's in front to make all your numbers the same length. In most cases 3 digits are good enough, but if you plan on ever having photos with numbers greater than 999, you should make it at least 4 digits like this:
0001
0010
0011
0100

It's important to keep the numbers in the same place in the filename. The best way would be to not add any characters in front of your numbers - that way you can't accidentally mess up the order. You can add words or other markers afterwards:
0001-Paris vacation-Louvre.jpg
0010-Paris vacation-Tour Eiffel.jpg
0011-Paris vacation-Montmatre.jpg
0100-Paris vacation-stuck in traffic.jpg

Even with the filename varying in length, you won't have any problems as the numbers are upfront and that'll ensure that the photos get arranged properly when sorted by filename.

Sebastian

SamirD

zeroone wrote: »

The files are out of te camera as 001, 002 etc in raw form. I then remove the files that are not good/i dont like and rename the files to be Image1, Image2 etc.

Windows recognises it fine.

When i upload here the files often go like this: Image1, Image3, Image4, image2, Image6, Image5....

Then in order for about 10 pics, then a similar pattern repeats above.

If from now i upload images, i keep it as 001, 002, 003... it should be ok? no matter what i tell the file system order to be on here it NEVER puts them in the correct order, not once, not ever.

Try just uploading a small batch of images directly from your camera without renaming. If you still have trouble, then there's something going on. If it works fine, then it is your renaming schema that's causing the issue as per rainforest's post.

Let us know what happens!

roadgray

If you need a tool to rename many photos at once, I recommend FastStone Image Viewer. It's free, fast and reliable.
There are many programs for bulk renaming but FastStone Image Viewer is the only I know that is also great for reviewing images (including raw files) on the fly.

SamirD

There's also the command line command REN or RENAME. Works very fast and is free since it's actually built-into Windows.

rharris

I know it doesn't help but I can't say I've ever had this issue. With software I rename all the files to "Name&Name_001" etc, then I create a gallery (often journal style) where all the file numbers I listed clearly below each photos. They're never out of order. I hope you find a solution soon!

SamirD

Because you have the names first and the numbers are all 3-digits, you'll never have this issue.

MT Stringer

Whenever I have had this issue, it was caused by the camera shooting at ten frames per second, and I wind up with 5-6 images with the same time stamp. No fault of Smuggy for that. I have accepted the fact.