How to save custom order

The key is to pay attention to both the current source — which can be a single folder or single collection — and the current sort setting. Each source (folder or collection) does save its own Custom Order and as Jim said, as long as you have not changed that, it actually is saved.

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@dennishmiller wrote:

I don't see any way to switch back to the custom order, but if you know of one, please tell me. Much obliged in any event.

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In the Library module, a menu in the toolbar tells you which sort order is active, and one of the choices is Custom Order. That is where your custom order is saved. If you found it was set to Capture Time, switch it back to Custom Order and you should get back the last Custom Order that was set for that source. If the toolbar isn’t visible, choose View > Show Toolbar or press the T key.

The reason I said to pay attention to the selected source is that each source can have a different sort order setting. So if you tried to “come back” to a sort order but it is different, maybe you didn’t actually return to the same source. For example, maybe you were creating a Custom Order in a particular collection or folder, and when you came back it was to a different collection or folder which was set to Capture Time. A slide show is based on the current source.

If you want a certain Custom Order to stick, it’s a good idea to create and name a specific collection before sorting. Then you always know that collection has a custom order. I would definitely create a named collection for a slide show.

When you say you “sorted your catalog,” that’s why we’re saying to use more precise terminology because you can’t actually do a custom sort on the entire catalog (manual ordering is not allowed in the All Photographs collection, for example). So you must have been doing it in a more specific soruce.

By the way, it is definitely useful to lock down a sort order by hacking the filename (batch renaming with a Sequence Number added to the start of the filename). But you must be sure you will never change the order again, because if you do, it is not easy to renumber already-sequenced filenames in Lightroom Classic; you basically have to rename each one individually by hand in the Metadata panel. This is because Lightroom Classic batch file renaming is not powerful enough to do something like drop the first 3 or 4 characters of a filename and replace them with new characters. The only things you can do with the current batch renaming feature is add a new set of sequence numbers at the front without changing the old ones, or completely rename the files without using any of the previous filenames. (I keep hoping Lightroom Classic will add a proper batch renaming feature.) There are very powerful file renaming utilities out there, but if you run them on the original files Lightroom Classic will completely lose track of them all…which is why Lightroom Classic needs more powerful batch renaming features inside the application itself.