Mobile photo albums

You remember back here where I said the iPad was brilliant for photos, particularly as a compact photo album? And do you remember back here where I said it doesn't play well with others? I've just had a very tedious and frustrating few hours trying to do (a) in spite of (b).

I spent much of the afternoon going through my digital photo archives, which begin shortly before Jos was born, to pull out a selection of my favorite photos to take with me. For something like this, chronological sequencing is important. The basic file manager in Vista could do this adequately, until I decided that I wanted to rotate some images. Because that changed the date by which it sorted to today's date, rather than keeping the original date of the photo.

Fine.(*)

So I re-named each of the copied photos with a sortable title, using YYYY.MM.DDx format (eg 2003.03.14b for the second photo in the album taken on 14 March 2003). Worked a charm.

And then I sync'ed the photos into iPad using the iTunes interface. Easy peasy.

Yeah right.

The photos were in some very weird, apparently random sequence. Some googling told me that the native photo editor uses a variant of the embedded creation date to sequence the images. Except the creation date it uses isn't necessarily the date the photo was taken, particularly if you modified and saved-as. (If it had used the actual date the image was first created, it would have been fine for my purposes.)

Back to Dr Google. I was not the first Windows user to encounter this frustration. Apparently, the iPhoto program that comes with Macs overcomes this iPad bug quite readily. Not much use for me. Others suggested using one of the various third-party apps. Except they (the apps) all got roundly trashed by their reviewers as being utterly hopeless. Still others suggested re-naming/saving each pic in the desired album in sequence, forcing the time stamp into sequence. Not very practical if you need to make any changes to a largish album.

In the end I did find one bloke who had come up with a work-around. He's using professional photo-editing software, which I neither have nor need, but it gave me enough information to achieve what I wanted. To force the iPad software to sort by the filenames of the images, you have to remove every other bit of sortable (eg date-type) data. Thankfully you can do this in bulk.

1. Simply select all the photos in the album, (open your album, click into into it, then Ctrl+A)
2. Right-click to bring up the menu, and select Properties from the bottom, 
3. Click on the Details tab, then click on the "Remove Properties and Personal Information" hyperlink at the bottom.
4. In the dialog box that comes up, select the "Remove the following properties from this file" radio button", press the "Select all" button, and then uncheck the "Title" box (first one), then click OK, and OK again, when you return to the Properties dialog box. 

Now you can re-upload the album via the iTunes sync process.

Of course, if you discover you misdated one of the files, or forgot to rotate one of the images, or make any other change whatsoever, you have to repeat the data-stripping process before re-uploading the photos. No live updating for you. But it's still way better than the alternatives.

It's ugly, but it works. And I now have an electronic brag book full of far too many cute pictures of my kids, nieflings (including Sam) and other family members. And they're in order.


(*) As a friend pointed out, when a bloke says "Fine", he means "Yeah, whatever, I wasn't really listening."  When a woman says "Fine", it is usually said through gritted teeth, and means "You little fucker. You'll get yours."