Numeric Sorting is NOT natural ordering

That was my point: computer ordering is not natural or lexical ordering. Which makes your reply a fairly poor one: instead of telling me to change my working practices you could try accepting and owning the problem.

The end user requirement *always* outweighs any limitations of a programmer’s short-sighted blinkered mindset.

Library indexing and retrieval would not work for humans if the programmers of such systems applied your methods and logic to sorting and ordering. Even Microsoft manages to get this correct within its office products, even if it still screws it up somewhat at the OS file system level.

Much the same applies to the use of blank spaces in file names or in any lexical string sort. There are many quite well known ordering algorithms for achieving natural number ordering and lexical string ordering; try looking for them.

If one is going to allow sorting and ordering in the first place then those functions should do what the user wants and needs, not what the machine decides, let alone what a lazy programmer cannot be bothered to make functional. This isn’t rocket science: it’s basic usability and UI good practice.

The goal of good software production is to allow the user to do what they want and need, not what you or the program deign to permit. The sort/order functions in NGG are seriously flawed; as one simple example, it makes creating a storyboard or flipbook sequence very complex – i.e. close to impossible.

Cais

Thanks – but I already knew all of that – if you’d paid attention you would have noticed that.
I’ve been “in” IT for over 35 years – and “in” image handling and processing for even longer: which is precisely why I was complaining about the sort issues; because we’ve had solutions to this set of problems since the early 1960s. It’s a significant part of how financial systems and spreadsheets and databases and library retrieval systems all work – by using sorting algorithms to present information to end users in *HUMAN* terms. We’ve also had solutions to the human interface aspects of sorting for almost that long: mostly involving giving users meaningful and clear interfaces with helpful popups and explanations – and good documentation.

The points here are relatively simple:

1] it is not made clear that setting a default sort order in Gallery Options removes the ability to sort within each gallery’s management page; this is an illogical application of a rule: setting a default should not block case by case over-rides unless one is going to apply much more granular permissions sets to the admin UI – for example so that root or superuser or supreme master of the universe can limit *exactly* what each other class of user may or may not do within the admin UI. All a default sort rule should do is set the normal order on import and presentation and allow the end user of a gallery management page to alter that order as required on a case by case basis.
Moving such an over-ride into the “green” control on pages/posts doesn’t help: especially when it isn’t documented that it *has* been moved.

2] it is not made clear that the sort orders available to the end user when adding a gallery to a page/post still do not allow for natural or lexical ordering in a logical consistent and coherent manner.

Meanwhile the available ordering options are limited.

Custom ordering as provided in NGG is a non-starter when the target gallery contains more than a few dozen images – whilst adding new images to an existing custom sorted gallery becomes a complete nightmare since there is no way to record and preserve that ordering schema: custom ordering is in effect a one-time randomisation that isn’t preserved across the process of image addition or of any changes to gallery presentation mode – e.g. from basic thumbnail to any other gallery mode – which can be particularly problematic in a WP multi-user environment with shared galleries.

3] the algorithms currently used for ordering are not efficient or effective.
There are dozens of different and quite well known sort order algorithms which do a better job than those currently deployed in NGG. You invite me to contribute my expertise; my expertise says – start with the wikipedia entry on sorting of numbers and classes. Then investigate how lexical ordering works across strings with empty spaces or unicode non-alphanumeric characters. Basically, you’re not using the power of collations in SQL stores and you’re also not using SQL sorting effectively, let alone the power of your coding and scripting languages.

Whilst NGG is an extremely powerful and generally fairly well-written and relatively robust product it suffers major flaws in the UI; not least because it is still living in the late 20th century – delivering command driven interfaces rather than task driven interfaces. The workflow to achieving a usable gallery display which meets a users’ requirements is frankly awful, and far more time consuming and complex than it needs to be.

My expertise also says: I did offer you my expertise. You elected to trivialise that contribution.

Oh sorry, did I just patronise you and treat what you wrote as trivial? That’s just what you did to me. Never assume the end user knows less than you do. If you don’t understand or are unsure about what they wrote then ASK them for clarification.