Renaming and renumbering files in order of selection

It sounds as if you are doing everything correctly.

Is "ABC02" the only one not in the expected order?

Is it always the second Image in the selection that is mis-numbered, or is it always this particular Image regardless of position in the selection?

Is it in a Stack? Is there anything about it that stands out to you?

IN addition to Kirby's suggestions, as a test try breaking the sequence down to see if you can find where the problem is.

For example select the first 5 images and run your rename. Does is work as expected or is there still an image seemly out-of-order?

See if you can find the trigger that is causing the problem.

FWIW - I tried it here on a small test library (17 images) and it always works numbering the images in the order they are shown in the browser.

Aperture is actually doing something clever: it keeps an internal list of the order in which Images were selected, and it uses this list for operations such as renaming with a counter or a sequence. How the Images are shown in the Browser is, at best, just a interim step towards creating the _selection order_ (just made that up) that is used for operations of this kind.

I had assumed you knew that from the way you specified both setting the order in the Browser, and then also selecting them from first to last.

The order of a selection depends on both the order of the underlying images in the selection and the selection direction.

So a selection of images name 01 02 03 04 and sorted by name will sort 01 02 03 04 if the selection starts at 01 and 04 03 02 01 if the selection starts at 04.

This is correct and actually a useful behavior. In fact Aperture has a number of selections and operations on selections it can do. Look in the edit menu.

regards

Seems deeply intuitive to me: it intuits the order I've selected the Images, and uses that!

"Intuitive" is grossly misused. Apple products have a much higher degree of extramural coherence than most, but the intuitive part is based on two simple things: the products make broad use of what the user has already learned (there is _nothing_ intuitive about a computer, or about a "mouse"), and they almost always provide direct visual feedback of their current state. Aperture's order selection violates this second precept, and so is, as you'd argue, a bitterer fruit than an apple. But that unseen layer exhibits a rigorous elegance which I find recouperates the product's polish. Even in its un-apple-y-ness, it's very Apple-y.

Straight to the point: once understood, it is easy and useful.

Okay, so it is the way in which I'm selecting the images. For example if I select eleven pictures and then see I've missed one at the beginning of a sequence so add that to the selection the re-numbering will be 12, 1, 2, 3.... 10, 11.

It looks like Aperture were respecting your "Primary selection" when renaming, see:

http://documentation.apple.com/en/aperture/usermanual/index.html#chapter=5%26sec tion=2%26tasks=true

So which is correct,

Not really a question of 'correct' but two different, equally correct, ways of handling this.

A case can be made for either one, I guess the best solution would be a way to have both and toggle between them but that is not the case here (or in any software that I am aware of).

So all that can be said is make sure you know the tool you are using and how it works, and don't assume that the new tool works identically to the old one.

regards