If I had been able to scan and set up ALL of Rene's photos before opening the site, AND if they'd all been marked with the date they were taken, then I could have put them all in the exact order they were shot and numbered them accordingly. However, that wasn't the case. I originally tried to use an "A" prefix for all of the 1980's pictures, "B" for the 1990s, etc. In a few cases, I scanned the photos, set up the gallery, and then later found an envelope of the negatives from that photo shoot with the date written on it. So some pictures that I had thought were early 90s, turned out to be late 80s, or vice versa. I also occasionally found a set of pictures (with the date recorded) and realized that it needed to fit between, say, Set A007 and Set A008. Instead of making it Set A007.5, I put a brand new number on it.
Why didn't you simply re-number the sets?
Once a photo gallery is finished, the "Back" buttons, the "Thumbnail" buttons, and everything else is linked to the Set Numbers. Changing the Set Number would break all the links.
So you now have the correct dates for all the photo sets?
No, some are still guesses. If there wasn't a date with the pictures or the negatives, I used a things like: the length of Rene's hair, whether she's wearing her wedding ring, and comparing her looks to other sets which did have dates. Rene also helped in estimating the dates, based on where she was living at the time of various photo shoots.
There's a set marked "Part 1," yet there are no other parts. What gives?
I've tried to keep all the galleries roughly the same size, which meant breaking some of her major photo shoots into two or more sets. All the parts will be posted in order, but not necessarily one immediately after the other. For the sake of variety, I may post, say "Part 1" from a farm shoot, and a month later post "Part 2." This way, if someone doesn't like farm pictures (who doesn't like farm pictures?) then they won't have to wait two or three weeks before seeing something different. This may change, based on the feedback I get.
Digging through Rene's boxes of photos (as well as my files for the ones that I took), I'd quite often come across an envelope full of pictures, none of which were numbered, and no negatives to cross-check them with. In these cases, I did my best to arrange them in an order that made sense.