Sorting Photos on the iPad

Let's just jump into the meat of this one. The first thing I did when I got my iPad this week was to export my portfolio catalogs in Lightroom to folders that the iPad could display as Albums. The entire workflow is a bit of a pain but totally worth it to have a gorgeous digital portfolio I can take with me. :) I'll post my entire workflow on creating and managing my portfolio on the iPad in a few days. For now I want to get the big question I immediately ran into after my first portfolio sync: How can I sort pictures on the iPad? Sorting my portfolio pictures is important to me to tell the story I'm trying to tell and the iPad wasn't displaying my photos in the same order as they were stored in my desktop directory.

I don't use iPhoto at all; I sync pictures to my iPod and iPad by using specific folders that I manage through Lightroom (I sync the folders with iTunes, I just manage the folders and their content through Lightroom). It's entirely possible that iPhoto includes an easy way to sort pictures on the iPad. When not organized by iPhoto, though, as best I can tell the iPad sorts pictures based on modification time--when the picture was last modified (not when it was taken and not in alphabetical/numerical filename order).

If you also don't use iPhoto to organize your photos, here's how you can force your photos to be sorted and displayed in the order you want on the iPad:

NOTE: DO NOT do this on your original files. Make sure you copy the files you want to sync with your iPad into the sync directory BEFORE you attempt this. Don't run this on your original files!

1. Get all your pictures in a folder on your Mac that you're syncing with iTunes (more on this in a later post) using whatever method you currently use
2. In Finder, sort the pictures in the order you want them displayed by renaming them in sequential order, like ipad-photo-01.jpg, ipad-photo-02.jpg, etc.
3. Launch Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities)
4. In Terminal, change directories into your sync folder. For simplicity I assume all you're photos are in one folder that you're syncing with iTunes called 'iPad':
   

   $ cd ~/Pictures/iPad
   

5. Once you're in your iPad sync directory and the photos are named in sequential order in the order you want them displayed, run the following command in Terminal:

   $ let count=10; for files in `ls *.jpg | sort`; do echo "Changing modtime for $files to 2010010100$count"; touch -t 2010010100$count $files; let count+=1; done

NOTE: The single quotes that surround `ls *.jpg | sort` are backticks, the same key as the ~ (tilde), and don't type the $, that's your shell prompt; type everything after that.

What does this do? It changes the modification time of each of the pictures in your directory in sequential order, starting with Jan. 1st 2010 and 10 seconds and increasing each modification time by one second. In other words, it changes the modification times to be in the same sort order as your filenames. It doesn't change the actual picture, or the names of the files, just the modification times.

So far I haven't been able find anything concrete about how the iPad sorts JPGs, but in my testing (and for the 8 Albums I use in my portfolio) the above works like a champ. Use with caution on copies only, and good luck. :)

In the next few days I'll post my entire workflow from Lightroom through to my iPad, which allows me to manage all my photo updates on the iPad from Lightroom.