willemx

Thanks for joining in! Yes, in LR my images are already in a sorted collection. If I should export this collection and rename the images, I could indeed import them in PTE in the right order. But, if I later would add new images to the collection in LR, I could not export again without things getting messy: new images would get duplicate sequence numbers and all images later than the newly added ones would be renamed. So this would only work for a one-time export-import. Instead, I have chosen to use exiftool (or actually AdvancedRenamer (which uses exiftool)) to rename the exported files based on date-time. That way I could always add new images and have them automatically inserted in the right posistion. (If Lightroom could rename images during export based on date-time I could skip the renaming with exiftool, but alas, LR can only rename based on date, not time.)

During the last couple of days I have been tinkering with a trial version of PTE 7.5. I am getting to the point now that I think PTE was not meant for me. I have not come to this conclusion lightly; I read the manual, browsed the forum and did a lot of experimenting. I know now that PTE can do everything I need it to do and can produce stunning output. However, it is just taking me way too much time due to the (in my opinion) extremely confusing and counterintuitive user interface. It is very frustrating to me that PTE cannot do the most basic and simple tasks (adding, deleting, editing, moving images around on the timeline) in a way that I can appreciate and have gotten used to from working with other applications. Although I know PTE can do all of these things (and I did them in some way or another), I have just not found a proper way for me to do it. Just some examples: If I delete an image, the images "to the right" don't snap to the left, If I drag a picture into the timeline, it just drops into another one, messing everything up instead of neatly fitting in by making enough room, I cannot just pick an image and drag it to another place in the timeline, I keep trying to right click to change object properties, but they are not there, If I trim a video clip, nothing happens to the slide duration (it just gets a freezing image at the end), (and if I trim it in the converter I just get yet another converted image (that I didn't want in the first place, but PTE cannot handle my .MTS AVCHD files)), I... I could go on but I won't. I know that there are many nice and helpful people on this forum that would like to help out on every item on this list (I think this is one of PTE's most strongest points), but I am afraid that this list is getting just too long. So, I will sleep over it one more night, but I fear will have to leave you all. Please note: This post is not meant to be un-nice to or critical of the developer(s?); I am sure that there must be valid reasons for PTE to work the way it works. I really do appreciate PTE, especially the extremely powerful (and easy and intuitive way!) of creating pans and zooms, which was the main reason for me to look into PTE.

@Xaver & Denis: I think this file renaming option is the way to go for me. I will proceed with some more PTE exploration now and will not give up on PTE yet... Thanks very much! (I'm beginning to like this forum...)

@Lin: I was still typing my answer to Dave so I had not seen your comments yet. (You boys and girls sure are quick!) So I understand that sorting based on metadata date-time is not possible in PTE. That is really disappointing. For a developer this should not be a big problem to fix I think (...having been a developer myself for a long time Missing metadata for some or all of the images could just be ignored, resulting perhaps in a seemingly random ordering, no big deal... Users could be notified of this problem by PTE and perhaps be prompted to select a different sorting criterion. Regarding your second advice (let Lightroom do some form of file renaming based on metadata): I will look into this. However, this will mean that files will be renamed, thereby loosing the connection with the originals in LR. This can be a problem if in the future I want to update the slideshow after doing some more editing in LR or adding more images. It will be very hard to locate the right images then and also maintaining the renaming scheme will be very difficult and error-prone. So, best thing would be if a developer steps in and solves this once and for all. BTW, do you happen to know a developer...?

Thanks for your swift reply! Some more details then: In the slideshow, there are (approximately 750) images from 3 cameras (and a couple of smartphones), so using the filename for sorting is not an option. I never rename images (don't want to loose the connection with the originals in my Lightroom database). Can P2E not just sort by image date-time? This is the most natural way of sorting photos and videos I think. Most photo-handling apps (like Lightroom) do this by default. I would rather not go handpicking through 700+ files to get everything in order.

I have just downloaded a trial version of P2E to make sure that P2E can do what I need and right away I seem to stumble upon a major obstacle. I use Adobe Lightroom to process my photos (and videos) and exported the processed images to a folder readable by P2E. NB: During export, the metadata was left intact in the exported files. How can I now make P2E sort my slides in the right chronological order, that is: sorted by date (not the file creation date or file modify date, but the original media creation date as recorded by the camera in the metadata). That way I could just import my photos and videos for for my slideshow and have them already in the right chronological order. (...And, since P2E wants to convert all my video files before using them, the converted video files need to be in the right order to.)