Lightroom 5 importing photos in random order

I'm going to toss this out here even thought it's an old thread because there's a lot of suggestions from people who obviously can't imagine why capture time would  matter. I bracket my shots specifically to be to batch process with Photomatix. This issue seems to come and go. Nobody seems to know why.

Thankyou sooo much. I had the same issue and now resolved!

I have a solution!

When you import from a media card reader (haven't confirmed from when you import from a camera) you need to NOT be in the DCIM level of the media card/camera. Point Lightroom to import from a higher level directory. For example, the exact directory that your files are in.

DON'T IMPORT FROM THIS FOLDER: (DCIM)

IMPORT FROM SOMETHING LIKE THIS FOLDER: (100EOS5D)

Now everything should import as you expect it to.

To be fair, someone gave this solution on page two, but it looks like everyone ignored that person, lol.

This has worked for me several times now.

Here's what I did and it seems to have solved the issue, at least for now. After selecting "import" under the "source" header select your media card or source and voila all the files are in chronological order....proceed as usual.

i have encountered this problem many times, as the viewing of photos from the import window arranged by the date is way more convenient than the sort method, the solution i find is something like this,

• go down to the right side of the window to find the "destination"
• then click on the triangle to get a view of photos according to the date
• then tick on the date you want to import,
• check the import window, all the photos taken on that date will be selected and ready to import
• click import to all the photos on the particular date

It seems if you Sort on Media Type you can get a properly ordered and numbered sequence of images or clips. Makes total sense right?

Same problem,  Never used to happen, and I can't pinpoint when it started but I wish they'd fix it.  I used to import the files with my own naming convention, but they would stay in order of capture time.  Now they import with my name but out of sequence time-wise.  It is very frustrating.

I'm also having the same problem, I have to restore to importing and then renaming in 2 steps

oh man, this has just started happening to me after the upgrade to el capitan. I regularly import thousands of GoPro stills (time-lapse) and it is imperative to rename with sequence numbers as the GoPro numbers start repeating quite quickly so using original filename is useless. It's never really been a problem as long as you rename on import with sequence numbers... until now... I've tried all possible sorting options and none stick... kind of unbelievable really !!! sort this out Adobe !

Having the same problem.  I shoot events sometimes with two or more camera bodies and want to import the files from each CF card with a continuous numbering as in, custom_nnnn, where custom is the name of the shoot and nnnn is the sequence number.  the order of the event is often important in how the photos are post-processed (as lighting conditions change, etc.) but the sequence numbers are random with regard to the shoot order.   I can sort the imported photos by capture time but that mixes the photos from different bodies together and makes a different mess not any better.  This is a problem that needs a real solution and not just workarounds.  I import using a card reader on 2013 mac pro and 2014 macbook pro both running MacOS 10.10.5, canon 5D, 5DMkIII, 5DS, and 7D cameras, Lightroom CC2015.  Yes there are workarounds and outside programs for importing but the point of Lightroom is to organize and view and process photos and it is not working correctly.  If it is some obscure setting, the default should be the logical import order.  I can't even think why you would want to rename the files in a random order and it is not clear how or why Lightroom chooses the order it does for importing.  Can Adobe please address this issue.