Ordering photos and videos for a slideshow or montage

The problem

Ordering photos so that when imported from a Windows PC to an iPad (or other tool) they would be in the right order. The end goal was to import them into a slideshow app already in the required order.

Mistake #1 - renaming in Google Drive

I received the photos via email and had imported them directly to Google Drive using the button in Gmail. I then renamed them with a number prefix so that they would alphabetize to the order that I wanted.

When I was ready to start compiling, I downloaded the whole folder to my computer. But they had the original filenames! After some researching, I found that Gmail automatically used an "Image Link" when importing. This meant that I had renamed the link instead of renaming the actual file.

Discovering Google Colaboratory

There was little to nothing on Google about my specific issue and "Image Links" in general, but I discovered a similar problem for a shared folder. One of the responses there suggested using Google Colaboratory which with these two snippets, worked perfectly.

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/gdrive')

!cp -r '/gdrive/My Drive/OriginalFolder/.' '/gdrive/My Drive/NewFolder'

This copied over all the files from OriginalFolder to NewFolder within Google Drive.

Using ExifTool

Now that I had the files on my computer and in the right order, I still needed a way to load them to the iPad with the correct ordering. Some of the photos had the Date Taken file metadata which is what the iPad uses for ordering.

Lots of online resources pointed to using ExifTool for cleaning up that metadata and rjames86's exiftool cheatsheet taught me to set all the file dates to an arbitrary time with this command

exiftool.exe -r "-AllDates=2021:06:05 14:00:00" "C:\Path\To\Folder"

I was optimistic that since all the timestamps were now the same, the iPad would resort to ordering alphabetically by filename. I had been using the Files app for importing from Google Drive and the files still weren't coming in 100% in the right order, though they did now have the expected arbitrary date and time set.

What I really needed was a way to set the timestamps to be ordered in the order of the files on my computer. That would be foolproof for ensuring that they loaded in properly. But how to use ExifTool for that? I thought about scripting it myself but didn't really have the time. Thankfully, I found instructions for using ExifTool with the filesequence variable once the files already all have the same time.

exiftool.exe -r "-AllDates+<0:0:${filesequence}0" "C:\Path\To\Folder"

Voila! This worked great. At this point, I also realized that I could've and should've been using iTunes and a cable to sync a folder to the iPad, rather than waiting for upload, download, and then import from Google Drive.

What I'd do next time

• Ordering via renaming locally instead of on Google Drive
• Use exiftool for the incremental arbitrary timestamping
• Use iTunes and a cable to sync the photos to iPad instead of through the internet