How to send photos in order by email

“Which one is first?”

You are emailing twelve photos to someone who needs to read them in order. A landlord, a client, an insurer, a solicitor. You choose them carefully, attach them in sequence, check the row of thumbnails, and send.

The reply comes back an hour later: “Thanks. Which one is first?”

On your screen they were in order. On theirs, IMG_4480 sits ahead of IMG_4471, the wide shot is somewhere in the middle, and the two photos you re-took are at the end. Nothing is missing. It just no longer says what you meant it to say.

Two mail apps, and you only have one of them

In a chat, one app handles the photos at both ends. Email is different. Your mail app builds the message, and a completely different one may open it: Outlook at an office, Gmail in a browser, Mail on a phone. Each decides for itself how to lay out the attachments.

That is why this is so hard to pin down. Here is what people have reported, in their own words.

Outlook. A user on Microsoft’s own support forum described it exactly: “When I attach files to the email, files twists according to the alphabetical order and it doesn’t stay as I want. As I want to send files to the clients in a specific order this troubles me all the time.” Microsoft’s reply was that current versions keep the order you add them in. And when someone else asked how to change the order afterwards, a Microsoft moderator answered that “there is no any particular setting option available to change the order of attachments” once they are in the email.

Gmail. There is no way to rearrange attachments after you add them, and photographers have complained of Gmail “scrambling” the order of a set between attaching and sending.

Apple Mail. Photos added on an iPhone usually go into the body of the message rather than as separate attachments, and how that looks is, as one Apple Community answer notes, down to the mail app that receives it.

So the honest summary is this: some apps keep your order, some sort by name, and you will not know which one your reader is using.

What does not help

• Attaching more carefully. The order you attach in is only a suggestion to the other mail app.
• Explaining the order in the message. “The third one is the kitchen” works until they download the photos and the email is no longer next to them.
• Sending twelve separate emails. It keeps the order and buries their inbox.

What does help

Name the files so they sort. If their mail app sorts by name, give it names that sort the way you want. Use 01, 02, 03 and not 1, 2, 3, because without the zero a computer puts 10 before 2.

Put the number in the picture. Filenames help while the photos sit in a list. Once someone opens one, or prints it, or forwards it from their phone, the filename is out of sight. A number in the corner of the image is still there.

One file instead of twelve. A zip arrives as a single attachment and opens as a folder sorted by name. For documents, a PDF does the same job.

Doing all three with PicOrder

PicOrder was built for exactly this handover.

1. Open PicOrder on your computer or phone and choose the photos.
2. Drag them into the order you want them read in.
3. Download. You get one zip, and inside it every photo has its number in the corner and a filename that starts 01, 02, 03.

Attach the zip, or open it and attach the photos. Either way their mail app can sort however it likes: by name gives your order, and if it does not sort at all, the numbers in the pictures say it anyway. Everything happens on your device and nothing is uploaded, which matters when the photos are for a claim or a contract. Free for up to ten photos; Pro removes the limit.

For photos that have to be taken seriously

• Say what they are getting. “12 photos, numbered 1 to 12, attached as one zip.” It tells the reader the set has an order before they open it.
• Refer to photos by number. “See photo 7” is clearer than “the one of the meter”.
• Keep your numbered copy. When the reply comes three weeks later asking about one of them, you both mean the same photo.
• Leave the photos otherwise untouched. The number is plainly a label. Crop or filter nothing if the photos are evidence.

Why we built PicOrder

It started with an assignment. Pages of work, photographed and sent in to be marked, arrived out of order, and the marker had no way to tell which page came first.

Email turned out to be where the stakes were highest. Estate agents sending a property to a buyer. People sending a claim to an insurer or papers to a solicitor. Photos for an older relative who opens them one at a time. In every case the sender had the order right and lost it somewhere between two mail apps. So we made the order part of the photo, where no mail app can lose it.

The reply you want

Twelve photos, numbered, one attachment. The answer that comes back is about the photos, and nobody asks which one is first.