Album Photos don't stay in order when laying out a printed book

I used to get annoyed, in older versions of iPhoto, when I tried to do the layout for a printed book.

The auto layout feature laid out the photos in the exact order they were in the album.

If you didn't use the auto layout feature, the photos were displayed in order in the right-hand window.

Keeping this in mind, I recently took a multi-city trip and shot more than 1600 photos.

I edited them down to about 350 and then spent days and days getting everything into the correct order.

However, when I use the auto layout feature in iPhoto 11, the photos are randomly distributed -- the album order is ignored.

If I start over with the intent of laying things out manually, I find that the album photos, in the right-hand window, are also in no particular order.

I should mention that I used two cameras on this trip, a little pocket-sized Canon and my iPhone. Both batches have been combined and photos have been ordered to follow the chronology of the trip. It has occurred to me that perhaps the meta data on the iPhone photos and the lack of data on the Canon shots may cause iPhoto to order the photos using other perameters.

Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Is there something in preferences I need to click or turn on? Also, I seem to remember in older versions that there was a strip of photos running along the top, so you could follow the sequence and skip some photos, or make minor rearrangements -- that strip seems to be gone.

At this point, I plan to print out thumbnails or proofsheets of the Album (if I can figure out how) -- then use the printout as a guide as I pick through the photos in the book layout and drag them in one by one -- that should take days.

Any thoughts?