Date Sequence

[Rod45]

I am trying to create a slide show of photos taken by two or more different cameras. Dates on the cameras are synchronised so the photos (jpg files) can be merged into a single directory and displayed in 'date taken' sequence. When I try and do a bulk load, they sequence used is alphnumenic. As there are 600 odd photos, I would rather no load them one by one. Can anyone help?

[d_deweywright]

Unfortunately, that's a Windows and file system problem. Let's assume you go ahead and write all those image files to your disc. Now you go to look at the contents in Windows Explorer. By default, you can display them sorted by file name (not what you want) or you can click on the Date Modified header and Windows will just as gladly sort them and display them that way (which is what you want). And it really doesn't matter just what order the files were physically written to the disc.

 

Now, you say you want to create a "slide show". You don't indicate anything else, so I'm suspecting/guessing that maybe you have a player that will automatically display .JPG images when it finds a disc full of them has been inserted? Now you're dealing with the "smarts" of the player, and it sounds like it is sorting the files by file name. Not too much you can do about it until you rename the files to be in order.

 

The easiest way is to prefix each name with a three digit number, as in:

 

001 DCIM00102.jpg

002 DCIM00120.jpg

003 EXIF0032.jpg

 

and so on.

 

Obviously, not a trivial job, but something like that is what you'd need to do to satisfy a player that runs an "automatic" slide show.

 

Your other option is to create a DVD slide show, which is really a DVD movie of still images. You'd do that using something like VideoWave (from the Creator 2010 Video section, Edit Video Advanced). There you drag each file into the slide show in the order you want, you can select fades and transitions and duration for each slide, and background music, and then burn that to DVD using MyDVD. That will take you a fair bit of time to put together too, and will likely take up more space on the final disc.

 

So, if you clear up for us exactly what you're doing, what hardware you're using for playback, we might come up with some other suggestions.

 

Let us know!