Why does the iPad mix up the order of my photos?

I have a collection of holiday photos on my PC, carefully numbered thanks to your recent item on ordering photos for slideshows. When syncing with my iPad, the photos transfer totally jumbled up. How can this be avoided, and the photos on the iPad appear exactly as arranged on the PC?

Peter Rawson, by email

Mac owners can set the order in iPhoto but it’s not so easy for PC users. Apple iOS has some idiosyncrasies when it comes to file handling and it doesn’t help that there are differences between the various versions. For example, iOS 3 sorts image files alphanumerically, whilst iOS 4 and 5 arranges them by the Date Taken tag, which is stored in the photo’s embedded Exif (Exchange Image File Format) data. There are a number of ways around this and one reasonably straightforward method is to edit the photo’s Date Taken data on your PC using free utilities like Irfanview (http://goo.gl/tzGI) or ExifEditor (http://goo.gl/hh0pq). It’s not too difficult on a handful of images but if there’s a lot of them and you want to avoid moving your images back and forth between the iPad and PC there are apps that can create custom slideshows and set the order pictures are shown. The best known is Photo Slideshow Director HD, which costs £2.49 from the App Store.