Let's say I would like to use IP.Gallery as a family photo album (with a ridiculously large family ).
Photos are being added in albums for various events throughout the years, in the order shown below (and by different persons);

• Camping in 2005
• Fishing in 2006
• Party in 2000
• Family reunion 1988
• Birthday 2007
• Vacation trip 2005
• Christmas 2006
• And then 99 other events

Now I know my family would like to have these photos (read albums) sorted after 'the date when the photos were taken'.
Currently you can chose to sort by the following;

• Caption
• Member
• Uploaded date
• Views
• Comments
• Rating

, whereas none of them would do.
The only way I can think of is to name each and every album that was created on the site with year:month (or similar) and then use the Caption sort option. Sure, that may be one way, BUT if I have to enforce that, on every family member that wants to contribute to the Gallery, I'd would have a hard time making sure that they did it correctly. It would also take unnecessary strength and time from admins/moderators.

A much better way would be to have an option via the ACP to enable a date field when creating an album (e.g. year-month-day) + making that sortable.
I can immediately hear someone from way back shouting 'customized fields' as there probably are 'many' other fields and needs that's wanted... fair enough, solve this in any way possible, but please expand IP.Gallery possibilities of usage.
Is there any other way handle this issue (without the obvious of paying someone to do a mod)?

P.S. 'Family' can easily be replaced with other groups e.g. friends, communities, clubs, etc.

They should at least have it sortable by album name then you could have named the albums themselves starting with date or something... But yeah I think it would be useful to have it sortable by picture taken date.... maybe have an optional field for date taken which can be filled out when uploading.

Yes, very true and needed (especially since it is photos we are dealing with within IP.Gallery).

Identified and possible solutions to sort albums/categories may include:

• Sortable 'Albums name' / 'Categories name'
• Optional 'date' field upon album/category creation
  
• sortable META date (such as time for picture taken) - and then let one explicitly selected photo in the album be used for date extraction.
• More?

Identified and possible solutions to sort images may include:

• sortable META date (such as time for picture taken, when that kind of META data exists)

P.S. My main need deals mainly with albums and having them sortable in some way.

P.S. And yes, I wish I had suggested/mentioned this earlier

Yeah - I see your point, but it won't make it into 2.2.0 I'm afraid.

Maybe someone could modify it for him, but it's really hard to find modders to make gallery or blog modifications for some reason.

I assumed that would be the case
As it seems to be 'relatively' small updates (with increased usage potentials), they might make it to 2.2.1?

I will consider them at that time, however it may SEEM relatively small, but in reality it's a lot of additional coding. We will see.

Of the features discussed in this thread, the single most important one (that would open up at least one way to use the Gallery in this way described above), would be to add sortable 'Albums name' / 'Categories name'. If that may reduce the changes needed to be done to the source base, then that is sufficient for the time being
Not knowing the exact changes needed, nor the size of them, adding one more sorting option at least SEEMS like a very small and isolated addition?
Anyway, I'm happy that you got the point and understood the need of this addition, and if not making it in the near time, maybe further down the road.
Thx for a good job!

Any chance of this issue making it into the roadmap (e.g. next release)?

There's always a chance of anything. I haven't mapped out the next minor or major release of Gallery yet though.