How to retain order

[dennishmiller]

I am giving a presentation to my cameera club and will be using their computer. My catalog consists of 150 photos that I added to a Collection so I could reorder them as needed. I saved the collection as a catalog to an external drive to take to the venue, but the order in the new collection was wrong - thei mages were not in the order I had made in the origincal collection.

Is there some way to export a collection as a catalog and retain the order of the collection? Thanks for any suggestions.

[Rob_Cullen]

I do not experience this. I exported as a catalog 5 files in a Collection sorted as 5,3,1,4,2

The exported catalog 'All Photographs' used the filename sort,

But Exported Catalog Collection appeared sorted as 'Custom' - as I had done in the Master catalog.

If I don't need the images to be in the LrC interface, then I Export the photos to new derivatives with a Sequence Prefix 001 > xxx. Then they will always be in the same 'numeric' sort order. I can also Import these 'sequenced' photos to a new empty Catalog where they sort correctly by Filename.

[dennishmiller]

Your experience isn't really relevant to what happens on my computer. Below is proof of the issue. I need to retian the filenames, so a numbered sequence would not be useful. Sort by Custom is grayed out in the View/Sort.

[Rob_Cullen]

Yes I see your 'Original' view of the JPGS  Custom Sorted-  What I don't see in your screen-clip is- if you are viewing a Folder of images in Grid View or a Collection in Grid view.  I suspect a Folder view as the word 'Collection' does not appear on the Tool Bar. Sorting of Folders and Collections are independent and can be different.

However your screen-clip of "transferred" is a view of the 'All Photographs' list.!  - That is not the Collection view, and for sure, it won't be sorted the same as a Collection. (TBMK it will default to Filename sort.)

Show a clip of the Collection in grid view. 

Hopefully you have not changed the sort in the Collection View which should still be in your Custom sort order. If you have changed it you will need to resort manually once again (or re-export the Catalog with the sorted Collection.).

[dennishmiller]

Thanks for the followup. I took your suggestion of adding an ordinal to eaach image, exported those, then created a new catalog and sorted them by name- got the job done. Thanks for the tip. 

[Rob_Cullen]

Pleased you got the job done.! All the best for your presentation.

"adding an ordinal to each image, exported those, then created a new catalog and sorted them by name-" achieved what you needed.

Curious about the order of your workflow steps-  There is no need to add a sequence number to original photos in the catalog -leave them named exactly as they are. You only need to rename the images you are exporting with a {Sequence-Filename} preset in the export dialog.