How to add numbers to photos, in order, all at once

Photo six, where it goes wrong

You have twenty-four photos that need to be read in order. Rooms of a flat, steps of a repair, pages of coursework. So you open the first one, tap edit, add a text box, type “1”, drag it to the corner, and save.

Then the second. Text box, “2”, corner, save. By photo six you realise four and five are the wrong way round, which means reopening both, deleting the numbers and typing them again. There are eighteen photos left.

Nothing about this is hard. It is just slow, and one mistake sends you back to the start.

Three things “numbering photos” can mean

People mean different things by it, and they do not all survive the same journeys.

• Renaming the files. 01.jpg, 02.jpg. Sorts well in a folder on a computer. Lost in most chats, because messaging apps rename what they receive.
• Writing the number as a caption. Easy to type, but a caption is a separate piece of text. Save the photo and it is gone.
• Putting the number in the picture. A small 1 in the corner of the image itself. This is the only one that survives everything, because it cannot be separated from the photo.

If the photos are ever going to be sent to someone, the third is the one that counts.

The ways to do it

One at a time, in your phone’s editor

Open the photo, tap edit, choose Markup, add text, type the number. It is free and already on your phone, and for three or four photos it is fine.

It does not scale. As an Apple Community answer puts it: “You can only open one photo at a time in Edit mode, and you need to be in Edit mode to use the Mark-up extension.” There is no batch mode, and you cannot copy a number from one photo and paste the next number onto another.

Renaming on a computer

On Windows, select all the photos, right-click the first and choose Rename: they come out as Name (1), Name (2) and so on. On a Mac, Finder’s Rename does the same.

This numbers the files, not the pictures, so it helps in a folder and nowhere else. One thing to get right: pad the numbers with zeros. Without them a computer sorts 1, 10, 11, 2, which is exactly the problem you were trying to solve.

An app that numbers a batch

A few small apps exist for this. On iPhone there is one called Add Numbers to Photos, described in its listing as “a tiny app for a very specific need” that adds numbers in order automatically. On Android, Auto Numbering Stamp stamps a sequence onto photos from the camera or the gallery. Both are free according to their listings.

PicOrder is ours, and it is built around the step the others leave to you: getting the order right before any number is added.

How PicOrder numbers a batch

1. Open PicOrder and choose the photos.
2. Drag them into the order you want. Swap four and five now, while it costs nothing.
3. Share or download. Every photo has its number in the corner, and the files are named 01, 02, 03 to match.

That gives you two of the three kinds of numbering at once: the number in the picture for anyone you send it to, and the numbered filenames for any folder you keep it in. It works on iPhone and Android, and in a browser on any computer with nothing to install. The numbering happens on your device and the photos are never uploaded.

The free version handles ten photos at a time and lets you set how big the number sits. Pro removes the limit and adds six colours, four typefaces, a choice of corner, and a “3/24” style that shows the total.

Getting the numbers to read well

• Pick the quietest corner. Bottom-right is the default because that is usually where the least is happening.
• Make it big enough for a thumbnail. If the photos will be glanced at in a chat, the number has to be readable at the size of a postage stamp.
• Choose a colour that stands off the photo. White on a dark plate reads on almost anything.
• Number after you edit. Crop and adjust first, so the number is not cropped away.
• Keep one sequence. If the batch spans several days or rooms, keep counting. One run of numbers is one story.

Why we built PicOrder

It started with an assignment. Pages of work, photographed and sent in to be marked, arrived out of order. Numbering each page by hand in the phone’s editor was the only fix on offer, and it was exactly as tedious as it sounds.

Then we noticed who else was doing it the slow way. Estate agents numbering a walk-through. Families sending photos to an older parent, for whom a clear number in the corner is the difference between a story and a pile. Nothing put the order first and the numbers second. So we built it.

Twenty-four photos, one go

Pick them, put them in order, send them. The numbers are in the pictures, and the reply is not “which one comes first?”