Hello,
I've been wrestling with getting photos to sort correctly on my iPad and have learned an insight that I thought i would share for others that may encounter the same issue.
My basic workflow is to create a publish service for photos I would like to view on my iPad, using one parent folder and sub-folders for each individual publish collection. I then sync this folder to my iPad using iTunes. All works well, except the photos don't sort as I would like...
Apple indicates that for photos that don't come from iPhoto or Aperture, images in albums are sorted by filename. In reality, this was not the case: a folder containing 20 images named 01, 02, ... 19, 20, were sorting by some unknown attribute. Thinking the iPad might at times use the capture time, I changed my publish service to remove all metadata and then checked to be sure the resulting renders did not have capture times, etc. I figured that without capture times, the iPad would have to use the filename. Alas. The same, inscrutable sort order persisted.
A call to AppleCare resulted in a suggestion of moving the images to a different folder, which I did. Whereupon the images sorted correctly by filename. Well, I thought, I'm not sure why this is this way, but I have my photos in the correct order, onwards! So I then deleted the original folder created by LR in the Finder, renamed the new folder to my desired album title—the same one I had used in the LR publish service, and synced. The same undesired sort order returned.
Well, I thought again. Isn't this interesting? To test this out, I chose another published folder that was also sorting incorrectly in spite of having the image filenames in the order I desired. I changed the folder name and synced. The photos sorted correctly on the iPad.
My conclusion then, is that there are some mystery associations with LR published folders, that follow the folder names, and which result in incorrect sorting on the iPad. Change the folder name, and sorting is correct. Change it back to the LR publish name, and they sort incorrectly.
I would love to have the sort order for iPad syncing work more smoothly with LR in general but, for now at least, I know how to arrive at the sorting I want!
Best,
Michael
