Randomly pictures are in wrong order or skipped when creating a slideshow in PSE 2022

Report · Apr 23, 2024

I'm creating slideshows from a set of travel pictures, all ordered by date old > new, usually 200+ pictures.

At the slideshow menu's tmbs view, all all are in the correct (timely) order, but at the slideshow itself:

sometimes a pictures is not displayed (but interestingly, the previous picture is displayed with double time!)
some pictures are displayed in wrong order (even though they are shown in correct order in the tumbs). E.g. a sequence of say two lake pictures followed by two persons pictures could be displayed lake-person-lake-person.... what off course is not nice in the final slideshow.

Detection of skipped or wrong ordered pictures comes out after exporting to mpg4 and reviewing only, what is very boring and time consuming.

Has anyone an idea of the reason and a possible workaround?

(PSE 2022 on Windows 11, German)

Report · Apr 23, 2024

How are you selecting the photos for the slideshow?

If you go to the Slideshow Media tab, are the photos in the correct order? If not, you can change the order there.

Have you tried different themes for the slideshow?

Report · Apr 25, 2024

Selection the photos for the slideshow is done by Key Tags

The photo order in the Slideshow Media tag is correct and yes, I could change the order there (no need, as shown in right order - oldest first in the media tab)

No, as pan and zoom theme is the only for full screen photos (without leading text slide, without music - this is added at a laters stage in PS Elements together with reducing video speed 70% for longer display of each slide and combining slideshow parts <250 slides into complete show with 300-400 slides and music)

Report · Apr 25, 2024

I'm not sure I have ever seen what you describe. With respect to the lake-person-lake-person example, were all of the photos in the same aspect ratio? And were they all from the same camera/device and in the same format?

Report · Apr 26, 2024

Most photos are panorama 16:9 ration and I could not see a 'preference' of PSE wrong sorting caused by otheraspect ratios.

Source is mostly a Lumix DMC-G6 (.JPG), but also mobiles like Pixel 7 and earlier a Moto G7 (all set at the same (local) time for correct order of all photos).

Until now, I could not find any logic for the order change or skipping photos.

Report · Apr 26, 2024

A user has just reported a somewhat similar problem. You can see my total guess in response here.

Report · Apr 28, 2024

Have read the post/issue from Bill - seems different and I agree, that missorder might be caused by serveral photos within a second resultingm which might result in two identical timestamps.

I use a different workflow: starting with copy all photos of a travel (DigiCam, Mobiles) into the designated folder in the PC via Windows and deleting photos I don't want to keep. Then adding location name to the filenames (e.g. P123456 this location.JPG).

Only than, I import this folder into PSE via the folder structure on the left screen side, to be tagged afterwards and some edited.

Report · Apr 28, 2024

@Christian_P, you may be interested in this blog article which helps explain how various date fields are used in the Organizer.

Report · Apr 29, 2024

@Greg_S. , many thanks for the hint to the 'Various Date/Time Tags' article.

Having read that, I remembered a slideshow of last year with the issue of slides swapped and took a set of 9 photos around the swapped photos to reproduce the problem.

Test with 9 photos

Finding: swapping occours with theme 'pan and zoom' only, at all other themes no swapping of photos (!)

At theme 'pan and zoom':

Slideshow with photos 6-8 or 5-8 or 5-9: all photos in correct order
Slideshow with photos 3-9 or 4-8 or 4-9: photos 7&8 swapped

Photo details time/orig/digit * create/edit * size

photo5 20.8.23 12:52/16.8.23 11:48/11:48 * 20.8.23 12:52/12:52 * 4608x2592 px (a set of orig+edited)
photo6 16.8.23 11:56/11:56/11:56 * 18.8.23 17:07/17:09 * 4096x2304 px
photo7 19.08.23 19:44/16.08.23 12:00/12:00 * 19.8.23 19:44/19:44 * WhatsApp image, no resolution info in PSE (Windows Explorer: 1600x1200 px)
photo8 16.8.23 12:29/12:29/12:29 * 19.8.23 17:07/17:09 * 4096x2304 px

What could trigged the wrong order? if slideshow starts one photo before an edited (5)? or the WhatsApp downloaded photo (7) with different size and incomplete size information? I have no idea...

Edit: I've attached screenshot of the propoerties of photo7 (WhatsApp photo) via PSE/info and from filesystem to show, e.g. size info has not been imoprtes to PSE

Edit 2: Just now, for testing, I re-produced the original slideshow from last year with total 52 slides. No slides swapped, but photo 5 displayed double time and photo 6 is skipped (numbers for orientation to above; actually those photos are about in the middle of the 52 photos show).

Report · May 29, 2024

Are there any inputs regarding my issue?
Update 9.6. @Greg_S. as it seems a bug in slideshow creator with pan&zoom template, were to report in order to hopefully get a fix for that? Any advice form expert side?

In short: it seems, the problem of changing display order of photos in PSE slideshows as well as skipping photos does only appear at theme 'pan and zoom'.

Who has an idea how to solve?? Any inputs appreciated.