Photos being added to an Album in Reverse Chronological Order

[AdkMike]

I have ACDSee Ultimate - but I assume this problem would act the same in any other version. My typical process is to, over the course of a calendar year, build up an album from various trips throughout that year. Within the album, I will rearrange the photos as necessary in order to best tell the story (but for the most part, they are roughly in chronological order). (This means that within the album, sort is set to "Custom Sort".) When I am ready to add more photos to the album, I go to the source photo folders and select the set I want to bring in (maybe 30 or so) - selecting photos by ctrl-Click. With the set of photos selected, I then set the category of these photos to the album name - to bring them into the album.

The problem is that the set of photos that I just inserted are inserted in reverse chronological order! This is a bad place for me to start rearranging, because my end result has the photos roughly in chronological order. So because of this reverse-order quirk, I have to one-by-one reorder them to bring them into chronological order. Then I carefully review and rearrange as necessary to best tell my story.

At one time in the past, when I added photos to an album, they came in chronological order - but now they are in reverse order. Is there any way that I can revert back to the previous way? I cannot just resort the album, because the album already has photos (perhaps 100s) that have been carefully arranged into the sequence I want.

[Greyfox]

I have ACDSee Ultimate - but I assume this problem would act the same in any other version. My typical process is to, over the course of a calendar year, build up an album from various trips throughout that year. Within the album, I will rearrange the photos as necessary in order to best tell the story (but for the most part, they are roughly in chronological order). (This means that within the album, sort is set to "Custom Sort".) When I am ready to add more photos to the album, I go to the source photo folders and select the set I want to bring in (maybe 30 or so) - selecting photos by ctrl-Click. With the set of photos selected, I then set the category of these photos to the album name - to bring them into the album.

My understanding of your post is that you are assigning the images to an Album, where the "Album" is actually an ACDSee Category, and when you assign the first batch, you are manually ordering the images in that batch to taste, resulting in the sort order being "custom".

When you select the images in the next batch, which are "newer" (but maybe not in exact date taken order) and then assign them to the "Album" you indicate they are appearing in reverse chronological order. In my tests when the "Album" is then selected, the newer images do appear ahead (before) the original ordered ones. The new ones are indeed in reverse chronological order, except for the one with the latest "Date Taken". That is consistently the last in the batch (correct chronological order), not first in that batch.

I don't know why that is, and unfortunately I don't know any means of changing what is happening with that particular procedure.

However .

You are no doubt putting a lot of time and thought into manually ordering your images but then relying solely on ACDSee to retain that as a custom order. Should there be an issue with your database, all the work you have put in to arranging the order potentially could be lost.

For similar applications, where I want to manually order images (perhaps not strictly in Date Taken order), I apply a 4 digit prefix to the filename (0000-Filename.ext) so my custom order will always be how I arranged it as long as the images are shown in Filename order. That also works well of the images are shown from a USB flash drive via a PVR on TV.

Once I have manually ordered a batch, I use the Batch Rename template function to apply the numeric prefix, with the start number set 1 more than the end number of the previous batch

[AdkMike]

Thanks for your time crafting your response!

Yes, you are exactly correct in your interpretation of what I did - sorry for not using the correct lingo. I don't mind the new photos coming into my album at the beginning (although I'd prefer they come in at the end) - because I can block move them easy enough.

And I am well aware of protecting against issues with the ACDSee database. So as not to corrupt the original filenames I actually do something a little bit different:
1) I add a tag to each photo in the album indicating that it belongs to the specific album
2) I select all files in the album, and into the IPTC job identifier field (I could have selected another field to use), I insert a2022x<000> - which results in all my photos of that album being numbered according to the order which I placed them.
Then to recreate each album from scratch, I could just locate all files with the specific album tag, and then sort according to the IPTC job identifier field.

ACDSee is already by far the best photo management program that I am aware of (and I looked at a lot). But I suppose the following function would be very helpful if ACDSee added it: In a "category", when you select a group of files, there should be a selection to press that resorts all selected photos into chronological order (or some other order) and moves them to the location of the last selected photo. It would be nice if new photos into a category could be configured to appear at the end also.

By the way, I will cautiously boast that I originated the prepending of filenames with a sequence of digits. Many years ago, I asked Picasa to add the feature to their program - about a half year later or so, it appeared. Then I assumed that ACDSee copied this feature into their product. I don't know for sure that its really true that I originated the feature - but I still use that feature all the time. Because when I am done making an album, I export all images to another folder with the prepended sequence number. In theory, then any reasonable display app that I could use would have the ability to display them in alphabetical filename order. This is how I can upload one of my albums into a Facebook album, and they retain my intended sequence.

So my question remains, does anybody know how to fix the reverse chronological order issue?