I Love My iPad But...

I'm having a problem organizing my photos. I want to show them in a particular order but even though I've numbered them consecutively the iPad insists on showing them in a random order. This is not exactly what I had in mind. I put the images in a folder on my Mac's hard drive, numbered them as "01.jpg" then "02.jpg" then "03.jpg" etc in the order in which I intend them to be shown. My Macintosh folder shows them in the correct order (logical, by number, lowest to highest). In iTunes I selected the folder to sync and let it do its thing. I assumed that if my hard drive lists them in numerical order so will the iPad. I don't understand why it doesn't occur that way. I checked the settings file for Photos on iPad and made sure "Shuffle" was off and tried again. The iPad still shows them in its own order (I said random but it's not random because it doesn't change, it's always the same, just not the order in which the files are numbered), it's driving me up a wall, so I reached out across my digital universe to see if any of my friends have the same problem and know how to fix it. Here's a sampling of what they said.....

Joseph Linaschke If you're syncing from Aperture or iPhoto, the trick is to put the sorting in manual order. When it's in an automatic order (i.e. sort by name, date, etc), for some reason the iPad sync doesn't sync in the right order. But as soon as it's sorted manually, it does. The easiest way to do this is to move a thumbnail manually, which will change it to manual sorting. You can move it back where it was, that's fine but the manual move is the kicker.

Susan May Tell At PhotoPlus Expo I met Craig Orsini who created an App, available at the App store, called Mediapad PRO. His booth was very popular so maybe this will help.

Tony Gale I use Foliobook on my iPad.

David Riecks Any chance it's in the order of the creation date that is embedded in the EXIF? It may be that Apple is leveraging the metadata, and ranking that more important than the filename you gave the image.

Brian Smale Foliobook let's you drag and drop your images, have multiple portfolios, and costs about 7 bucks.

Steven Noreyko I ran into this same problem almost immediately with my iPad. When syncing a folder of images from iTunes, the iPad will by default sort the images by image capture date. Unfortunately there's no way to change that setting on the iPad or in iTunes. If you have PhotoMechanic, you can use Tools Adjust Capture Dates & Times to adjust the image file capture date. [You can] sync images from Aperture or iPhoto (not ideal because I found they overcompress the images). [You can] create new documents for each image in Photoshop and save them in the order you want them displayed. Lame, but it will work. Otherwise, as some have suggested you can also try a portfolio app. FolioBook is one option that others have mentioned. I'm testing out Minimal Folio and I like its minimal-ness and the developer's response to feature requests. Searching for "Portfolio" on the App Store will give you a handful of app options at varying price points.

So..... Taking all of these solutions into consideration, and having superficially checked them out, I think I like the solution proffered by Andrew Webb who wrote: Portfolio For iPad is what I'm using. Very flexible and simple to use.

Here's the best part of what I learned, and really helped me understand the problem... the built-in photo chooser for images loaded in via iTunes does not pass on photo names. As Riecks & Noreyko correctly pointed out, iTunes is leveraging the creation date in the EXIF data to order the images. How am I going to solve this? Stay tuned, don't touch that dial.