Sorting galleries.

christulk

I have a querry regarding the sorting of photos. I have my galleries set up to sort photos by date taken in reverse order, i.e. I want the most recent photos shown first. This works well with the exception of one point. If I have a series of shots that were taken in order, they upload and display in reverse order, which makes the series show backwards: Here is an example of what I mean.

http://christulk.smugmug.com/gallery/1977742/1/163682945#133500329

When these shots were added, I wanted them to appear as first (as new uploads in my gallery), but would have liked the shots to 'run in order'.

Is there any way of keeping the 'set' of newly added phots appearing first, but arranging a 'subset' to appear in order?

Thanks in advance.

Andy

christulk wrote:

Is there any way of keeping the 'set' of newly added phots appearing first, but arranging a 'subset' to appear in order?

Thanks in advance.

It's possible someone may have a way, but I do not know of one, sorry.

jfriend

christulk wrote:

I have a querry regarding the sorting of photos. I have my galleries set up to sort photos by date taken in reverse order, i.e. I want the most recent photos shown first. This works well with the exception of one point. If I have a series of shots that were taken in order, they upload and display in reverse order, which makes the series show backwards: Here is an example of what I mean.

http://christulk.smugmug.com/gallery/1977742/1/163682945#133500329

When these shots were added, I wanted them to appear as first (as new uploads in my gallery), but would have liked the shots to 'run in order'.

Is there any way of keeping the 'set' of newly added phots appearing first, but arranging a 'subset' to appear in order?

Thanks in advance.

I can think of four ways to get such a custom sort order:

1. Choose to display your photos in reverse upload order and then carefully choose your upload order so that the images you want first are the last to be uploaded each time you add a new scene to the gallery.
2. Choose to sort by filename and do a batch rename on each new batch of photos before upload. For example, if you put a "batch number" at the beginning of every file, start at 999-0001 for the first batch, 998-0001 for the second batch and so on. You then number the second part of the filename in the order you want the shots displayed within that batch and the first part of the filename controls the display order of the whole batch.
3. Same as option 2, but use the caption instead of the filename for a sort key.
4. Select date modified as the sort order and a reverse sort and make sure that field is set on each batch of images such that the sort comes out the way you want. You'd probably need some sort of EXIF setting tool in order to do this or some "do nothing" batch process that causes it to get set.

I personally would probably choose the filenaming mechanism because you can see exactly how the sort order works each before uploading and it's fairly easy to move things around before upload by just changing filenames.

Andy

jfriend wrote:

I can think of four ways to get such a custom sort order

jfriend 1, andy 0.

I'm glad you stopped by!

christulk

Andy wrote:

jfriend 1, andy 0.

I'm glad you stopped by!

Jfriend, I'm glad you stopped by also. Thanks

yoyostock

Wow, I'm still trying to digest those instructions. But, if it works...thanks!

I think I also requested this type of feature some time ago. For me, I have a gallery for our son (half a year - months May through November) that I keep adding new photos to for that time period. I keep them in order (oldest first, most-recent last). But, there are situations where I find that a certain picture or two would make more sense if it were placed out of time order and somewhere else in the gallery. Unlike Chris's scenario where a string of photos would need to go in-order, while the rest of the gallery runs in reverse-order, I have been looking for a way to have individual photos put out-of-order, while everything else is defaulted to time-order. Does that make sense?

It would be great if SM could have a way to have a default sorting system (ie, date taken), with a feature that allows for a photo-by-photo override that would allow any given picture to be clicked and dragged into a new space even though it does not fall in time-sequential order.

And that's my 2 cents for today...

GaryBakker

yoyostock wrote:

It would be great if SM could have a way to have a default sorting system (ie, date taken), with a feature that allows for a photo-by-photo override that would allow any given picture to be clicked and dragged into a new space even though it does not fall in time-sequential order.

I'm struggling with this very problem. I thought sorting the gallery by date-taken, then changing the Customize Gallery sort option to 'position' would enable the minor photo shifting. But when I switch to sort by position it completely re-orders the photos again (to upload order?).

With a large gallery, it is painful to get things into the desired order.

Andy

Green Fleurdelis wrote:

I'm struggling with this very problem. I thought sorting the gallery by date-taken, then changing the Customize Gallery sort option to 'position' would enable the minor photo shifting. But when I switch to sort by position it completely re-orders the photos again (to upload order?).

With a large gallery, it is painful to get things into the desired order.

Changing to "position" will override your previous choice, and use the positioning #s instead.

GaryBakker

Thanks Andy. After setting my gallery sort option to 'position', I then found the 'sort gallery' menu item and sorted by date taken. Now I can do the minor adjustments using either drag and drop or position number moving.

I wish it were a little more intuitive, but this procedure gives exactly what I needed.

Happy Labor Day!