Illogical re-ordering of photos when copying to new gallery

shrekie · September 25, 2008

Hi,

I've just spent the better part of the last two hours trying to do something which I expected to be really simple, which is to copy about 90% of the photos from one gallery into a new gallery. I have read on the forums that there is as yet no feature in smugmug that allows you to do a mass copying of images from one gallery to another (apart from some third party apps), so I decided to manually make a copy of EVERY PHOTO INDIVIDUALLY, which took ages as it is a large gallery, and then select all the photos I had copied and MOVE THEM into my new gallery.

As if the manual process of copying each image wasn't tedious enough, after this process was completed and I went to check the new gallery, ALL the images were in the wrong order!

So, for instance, I had a gallery of images numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and I made copies of some of them so that the order became something like 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10. Then, I would move the duplicates, that is, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 into the new gallery. Now, when I open the new gallery, you would logically expect that the order of the photos would appear in the order that they were selected as above, but they become completely disorganised and not even simply appearing in reverse order. The new order becomes something like 7, 4, 1, 8, 9, 6, 2! So you can imagine that for a gallery of several hundred photos, this becomes a nightmare to try and re-order again, hence the wasted 2 hours.

Have I been going around this completely the wrong way or is there a serious bug in the way that this is working? Anyone else have any other suggestions other than 3rd party apps as to how to quickly duplicate a gallery?

Thanks.

Nelson

jfriend · September 25, 2008

shrekie wrote:

Hi,

I've just spent the better part of the last two hours trying to do something which I expected to be really simple, which is to copy about 90% of the photos from one gallery into a new gallery. I have read on the forums that there is as yet no feature in smugmug that allows you to do a mass copying of images from one gallery to another (apart from some third party apps), so I decided to manually make a copy of EVERY PHOTO INDIVIDUALLY, which took ages as it is a large gallery, and then select all the photos I had copied and MOVE THEM into my new gallery.

As if the manual process of copying each image wasn't tedious enough, after this process was completed and I went to check the new gallery, ALL the images were in the wrong order!

So, for instance, I had a gallery of images numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and I made copies of some of them so that the order became something like 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10. Then, I would move the duplicates, that is, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 into the new gallery. Now, when I open the new gallery, you would logically expect that the order of the photos would appear in the order that they were selected as above, but they become completely disorganised and not even simply appearing in reverse order. The new order becomes something like 7, 4, 1, 8, 9, 6, 2! So you can imagine that for a gallery of several hundred photos, this becomes a nightmare to try and re-order again, hence the wasted 2 hours.

Have I been going around this completely the wrong way or is there a serious bug in the way that this is working? Anyone else have any other suggestions other than 3rd party apps as to how to quickly duplicate a gallery?

Thanks.

Nelson

Does the new gallery have any sort of "auto sort" set?

shrekie · September 25, 2008

Thanks John,

No, the "auto sort" was set to "none" which makes it even more confusing to me. I take that to mean that if you move photos 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, it would leave it in that order when it's moved to the new gallery (but it doesn't appear to work that way).

jfriend wrote:

Does the new gallery have any sort of "auto sort" set?

richW · September 25, 2008

shrekie wrote:

Hi,

I've just spent the better part of the last two hours trying to do something which I expected to be really simple, which is to copy about 90% of the photos from one gallery into a new gallery. I have read on the forums that there is as yet no feature in smugmug that allows you to do a mass copying of images from one gallery to another (apart from some third party apps), so I decided to manually make a copy of EVERY PHOTO INDIVIDUALLY, which took ages as it is a large gallery, and then select all the photos I had copied and MOVE THEM into my new gallery.

As if the manual process of copying each image wasn't tedious enough, after this process was completed and I went to check the new gallery, ALL the images were in the wrong order!

So, for instance, I had a gallery of images numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and I made copies of some of them so that the order became something like 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10. Then, I would move the duplicates, that is, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 into the new gallery. Now, when I open the new gallery, you would logically expect that the order of the photos would appear in the order that they were selected as above, but they become completely disorganised and not even simply appearing in reverse order. The new order becomes something like 7, 4, 1, 8, 9, 6, 2! So you can imagine that for a gallery of several hundred photos, this becomes a nightmare to try and re-order again, hence the wasted 2 hours.

Have I been going around this completely the wrong way or is there a serious bug in the way that this is working? Anyone else have any other suggestions other than 3rd party apps as to how to quickly duplicate a gallery?

Thanks.

Nelson

Sorry for the troubles

We were just talking about this same file numbering issue this morning in our meeting. We are going to have one of the engineers take a look to see if we could sort like most 'computer folders' do.

While this is being looked at. Make sure you use a file numbering system that looks something like this:
From 1-99 images:
01.jpg
02.jpg
03.jpg
04.jpg
05.jpg

From 1-999 images:
001.jpg
002.jpg
003.jpg
004.jpg
005.jpg

See the pattern?

Now sorting by file numbers will be done 'correct'.

I like using Greg Wellman's AlbumFetcher: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47160

There are a few more apps here: http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Hacks+and+Apps

Again, sorry for the troubles.

shrekie · September 25, 2008

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the quick reply and for your explanation. I'm glad that I wasn't going crazy:)
Hopefully the engineers will be able to sort out the bug.

As a consequence of this bug, when I go to apply a watermark on all my images in that gallery, I check after a couple of minutes and there is still no watermark on the first image in the gallery. This may lead many users to think that the watermarking feature is not working, but in fact, it is watermarking images in the non-logical manner in which the images were sorted.

Thanks for the links - I will check them out.
Please post an update here once this issue is resolved:)

Nelson

richW wrote:

Sorry for the troubles
We were just talking about this same file numbering issue this morning in our meeting. We are going to have one of the engineers take a look to see if we could sort like most 'computer folders' do.

While this is being looked at. Make sure you use a file numbering system that looks something like this:
From 1-99 images:
01.jpg
02.jpg
03.jpg
04.jpg
05.jpg

From 1-999 images:
001.jpg
002.jpg
003.jpg
004.jpg
005.jpg

See the pattern?

Now sorting by file numbers will be done 'correct'.

I like using Greg Wellman's AlbumFetcher: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47160

There are a few more apps here: http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Hacks+and+Apps

Again, sorry for the troubles.

Illogical re-ordering of photos when copying to new gallery

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