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Sorting photos in a virtual IPS gallery
Sorting photos in a virtual IPS gallery

How to sort photos in a virtual IPS gallery, and why your photos may show up out-of-order

Justin Morabito avatar
Written by Justin Morabito
Updated over a week ago

Note: This feature is only available on the Pro and Studio plans.

You can sort photos in a virtual IPS gallery in three ways: 

  • Alphabetically.

  • Capture Time.

  • By upload date and time (default).

For both, you can select to sort ascending or descending. 

To sort photos in a gallery, click the "Sort" button in the header of the "Photos" panel while editing a gallery, and choose from the options available. 

Why are my images out of order when I sort them alphabetically?

Sprout acts like most photo browsers and file managers when sorting alphabetically - it sorts by the first number it finds in the filename. Therefore, if you name your files like this: 

Image-1, Image-2, Image-3 ... Image-10, Image-11, etc

Then Sprout will sort them with Image-1 first, and then Image-10 because it sees the 1 in 10 first, and 1 comes before the 2 in Image-2. 

This is why we recommend naming your files with a zero padding so that your filenames will look more like this: 

Image-001, Image-002, Image-003 ... Image-010, Image-011, etc

When you name your files this way, Sprout (and every other photo browser and file manager) will sort them as you'd expect because it sees the zeros and can put them in the proper order. 

How to rename files properly in Lightroom

To rename files with zero padding (as described above) in Lightroom: 

  1. Select all of your photos. 

  2. Click Library > Rename Photos. 

  3. From the "File Naming" dropdown, click the "Edit" option. 

  4. Remove any text in the editor. 

  5. Insert "Custom Text" from the bottom "Custom" section. 

  6. Type in a dash (to separate your custom text from the sequence).

  7. Insert "Sequence # (0001)" from the "Sequence and Date" section.

Save this as a preset. Now, when you rename files, you'll be able to type in a custom text (i.e. the client's name) and then it'll automatically zero-pad your numbers. 

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