How to organize photos in a new album or event

Question

First of all, please allow me to get something off my chest: recently, I gotmyself a new MacPro. My older MacBook died on me. One thing I was really happyabout is that, finally, I had iPhoto. Well, this turned into a nightmare. I donot consider myself as a tecno-idiot, but I guess I am from what I haveexperienced so far with iPhoto. It seems to me that is so"sophisticated" that its developers forgot those of us who only needthe simple pleasures of life...in this case just a place to store the photos ina particular order so we can see them or show them. Simple, no?
Thanks.
As for the actual problem, here goes: I use two notebooks, one is thisMac and the other is a Windows based unit.
Let me first refer to the organization of the pictures in the Windows basedunit
1. My pictures (all nicely organized each set in its own folder) havebeen on the Windows PC, using MS Office Picture Manager. Having iPhoto, Ithought I would move them to the Mac.
2. As we all know, when one downloads pictures from a camera, their"names" appear as a bunch of letters and the number indicating thesequence.
3. So, in MS Office Picture Manager, I have them organized in thefollowing manner 2003>wedding; 2003>Europe and so on right up to thisyear. Each folder begins with a year.
4. In, let's say, 2003>Europe, I organized the pictures startingwith numbers so that I have them like so: 2003>Europe>1. Paris-Eiffeltower;  2. Paris-Eiffel tower-top floor;3. Paris-Eiffel tower-panorama Paris...and so on.
Now, let me go to the Mac.
1. I copy-pasted my entire photo collection to an external hard driveand from there got iPhoto to import them where they landed in"Events", each showing as an "Event". All seemed well sofar.
2. It so happens that I am trying to sell my house. The realtor wantsa set of pictures, so I created a new "Event" and went into variousother events to pull pictures from them and form a special set for the realtor.And here is where the problem surfaced.
3. I started moving pictures into the new "Event". I thengave each picture a number (1-, 2-, 3-, etc.) and a description (main entrance,entrance hall, and so on, just like I did in MS Office Picture Manager). So farso good.
4. Then I went to View>sort>by name. It turned out that unlike PictureManager, iPhoto does not recognize numbers as "names" and so, it didnot put them in the right sequence.
5. NOT ONLY THAT, the pictures got scrambled and some of thedescriptions were in  sequence and othersnot and some reverted to their original names (in Windows) and a couple evenwent further back and appeared as DSCN...whatever.
6. I tried various ways. Nothing. So I called Apple support anddespite the fact that we seemed to be speaking different languages for a while,I finally understood that I needed to create an "Album" (under"Albums") and do the work there.
7. So I did, but the 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. classification still would notwork. So I tried A-, B-, C-, D-, etc. and THAT would not work either. So I justgave up in frustration.
So, my question is this: is there anyone who can kindly let me knowhow I can do something as simple and straightforward as creating a new album,move pictures from "Events" or "Photos" (I even tried fromthere) into the new album and have them sort themselves as sequence with thenames I give them. Or at least, stay in the sequence I assigned them.
I am sorry for this long-winded message, but there was no shorter wayto explain this.
Many thanks,
Emile

Answer 1

Emile
Bear with me a minute. You're confusing a lot of things.
1. As Larry says, on Windows you are using a File Manager for you your photos. All well and good if it works for you, but limited. Why? Because it doesn't leverage any of the extra information available with photos files. Essentially, a File Manager doesn't distinguish between a photo nd a Word file or a Music file. They are just files.
2. Photo Managers like iPhoto (Or Picasa, Aperture, Lightroom et al) work differently. They are designed to leverage the additional information available in the photo file. Case in point: Date. In the File Manager you have folders created for Year/Month/Day. In iPhoto the pics are grouped into Events automatically. These Events are based on the date and time the Photos were taken, and which is recorded in the Exif metadata for the photo file.
As we all know, when one downloads pictures from a camera, their"names" appear as a bunch of letters and the number indicating thesequence.
These are Filenames assigned by the Camera. In iPhoto you don't change Filenames you edit Titles. Titles are quite independent of filenames and are an entry in the Exif metadata.
I'm not sure what you've done in the renaming sequence, but iPhoto does not have a Sort -> by Name command. There is a Sort By Title command.
But you would not use Events for this job anyway. You would use an Album. Create an Album, drag the pics to it and then you can sort them in any order you want, manually. Then using the Batch Change Command you can create a sequence for them. So, Title the pics 'House Sale' and check the box to append  number and the result:
House Sale 01, House Sale 02 etc
Regards
TD