UKC

I'm putting together a slideshow of sorts and I want to be able to drag and drop my pictures into a particular order, then rename them all in that order so that when it comes to the show the pictures are in the right order.

At the moment, the drag and drop function doesn't work and each picture, when moved, simply returns to where it used to be. It seems that I will have to spend a few hours getting frustrated and annoyed doing this by a laborious process of renumbering and renaming.

Are there any applications/websites that I could use on my PC to help, or is this another Microsfot failure?

In reply to Frank the Husky:

I manually ran a script that modifies the registry to get around that in W7, as not being able to re-arrange was driving me mad. It's a little buggy but it does the job. The one i used i got it through here http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/disable-auto-arrange-folders-windows-7/ There should be one knocking about for your OS or if not you could edit the registry manually.

Otherwise, if you have access to one take all the files to a pre-w7 computer, drag and drop them in the order you want them in, select them all and right-click the first one, hit 'rename', clear the text so there's no name (or write a name of your choosing), and press enter or click outside so the name sticks. All files will be automatically renamed with consecutive numbers within brackets.


Yep. Some genius for some reason decided it would be better for us if we were not allowed to arrange our files in the order of our choosing. Give a carrot to that man!

ETA: Aparently that script works in w7 up to 10, so it should do for you. Once you've done it make sure you right click in the folder and tick the 'align to grid' option. It took me a while to figure that out...

In reply to Mr Lopez:

Thanks for that. I'll sit down later and go through that. I am not at all comfortable with changing registries or anything, and am reasonably computer illiterate, but this looks like the best solution I've seen in a while.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

It's a bit unnerving, but really is harmless. If you want to be extra safe you can do the same steps i did, which is.

Open the downloaded file with notepad to have a look at the registry changes you'll be doing, you can see that all you are doing is changing stuff to the folders. Then open your registry editor (regedit.exe, you can find with the search/run thingy) , and browse through to the entries in the downloaded file. (Each starts with HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and the rest is a standard URL type address).

If there's already a key with that 'name', write down the difference between what you have, and what the reg edit will change it to. If there isn't one then ignore it.

Go ahead and run the script. If any issues arise after running the script and you want to go back to how it was before, just go back to the editor and manually change back the key values to what they were before, and delete the keys listed in that document that were not in your registry previously, and that will put you back where you started.

In reply to Frank the Husky:

If you have Powerpoint you just create a slideshow from selected pictures, then you can very easily just drag them into whatever order you choose. If you don't have Powerpoint I presume Google Slides will do the same for free.

In reply to Mr Lopez:


And yet they left the code in place to do just that. Only it has to be enabled by some obscure bit flags in arcane registry settings...

In reply to Frank the Husky:
Yes, it's really annoying; windows used to allow dragging and dropping to rearrange but then an update stopped it - it beggars belief that some idiot thought this a good idea! I use Picassa. Files of photos automatically appear in Picassa and are updated with any edits and changes whenever it is on. They can easily be rearranged by dragging and dropping in Picassa and renamed and renumbered ( eg Climb 1, Climb 2...... Except the first picture which has no number and needs to be renumbered by hand for some reason) These names and numbers are then automatically transferred to windows where they now appear in the new order. All quite quick once you get used to it. Picassa is also better than windows for slideshows since the photos appear full screen with no boundaries.

I also use powerpoint for slideshows sometimes, but, although you can drag and drop, I don't think you can easily rename and renumber them so that it is preserved in Windows (but I may be wrong about this).

In reply to john arran:

Good advice - that never occured to me. Thanks.

In reply to Robert Durran:

I'd forgotten about Picassa, another good idea.

Thanks everyone.