Download image order sequence

Bolt50 · December 12, 2015

Respectful greetings. I am new (virgin) at downloading my galleries from Smugmug. I downloaded a wedding gallery and because of the size SmugMug puts it in a ZIP file. In this case there were 4 parts. When opened so I could load to wedding USB flash drive I noticed the ZIP folder had taken the order sequence that I had so painstakingly put together to tell the story of the clients wedding within my Smugmug gallery and ZIP or SmugMug or both had put it in filename numerical sequence resulting in taking the order I had placed the images in and rearranging it out of story sequence. Tech support mentioned they had no solution for their ZIP downloader in terms of leaving my order intact during the download....that in fact I would have to renumber every image I download from LRCC to SmugMug....really? Wow. Any suggestions. I head USB wedding packages were a trending offering. I would love to keep my carefully crafted story intact during the download so when I send to clients USB it remains congruent.
:dunno

AceCo55 · December 13, 2015

So once you have ordered the photos in your desired sequence, is there something stopping you from renaming them so that they remain in that sequence?
That seems the most logical step as most file sequencing software allows for ordering by filename, date created etc.
... but I may be misunderstanding your issue.

I use a program called "Bulk Rename Utility" which is very flexible/powerful, and free.
You can keep the original name or any part of it and add in anything else
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Richard · December 13, 2015

Hmm...if I'm understanding the problem correctly, the OP is doing the ordering in the Organizer, after the pics are on SM. AFAIK, there's no way to rename files once they have been uploaded.

The solution offered above is to rename the files before uploading. Since the OP is using LR, this should be quite easy. In the Library module, you can rearrange everything visually with the sort set to custom, then bulk rename the files in some "natural" numerical sequence. Then, and only then, upload to a SM gallery set to sort on filename. Even if the order gets scrambled in the zip files, unzipping them into a single directory will restore the correct order on the target machine if you set it to sort by filename.

Or am I missing something?

leftquark · December 15, 2015

As Richard mentioned, if you order them in LR, there's a setting in "Export", called "File Naming", you can turn on the "Rename To" option. Set it to "Custom Name - Sequence" and you can then enter your prefix and the start number. Set the "Custom Text" to something like "Joes_Wedding" and "Start Number" to "1". I also recommend clicking on the Drop-Down menu for "Custom Name - Sequence" and then choosing "Edit..." You'll see a bunch of options in a new window, and towards the top it'll say, with gray backgrounds "Custom Text" a dash, and then "Sequence #(1)" with a down arrow. This lets you modify the fields that lightroom will automatically populate. Click on "Sequence # (1)" and change it to "Sequence # (0001)". This will cause it to pad the numbers with additional zeros.

Some operating systems have trouble properly ordering numbers that have different lenghts. For example, it may say that "10" comes before "1". However, if they have the same # of digits, then it knows "10" comes after "01".

Download image order sequence

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