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Background: I'm designing a (data) model for a photo album. And, I've got stuck on naming attribute determining an ordering of a photo within an album.

Photo has following (technical) attributes:

  • AlbumID - identifies an album to which the photo belongs,
  • Order - determines own position within the album,
  • Name - user friendly name of photo
  • Description - user friendly description of photo
  • Image - image data for the photo

I'm quite unsure, whether the word Order is a correct noun to name the attribute. I've though of words, number and position, as alternatives, but they doesn't feel to be adequate either.

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  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because we don't answer name requests, especially for coding and business.
    – Arm the good guys in America
    Dec 11, 2019 at 4:10
  • Do items within photo albums actually have an order? Is your photo album linear? Is order important? Maybe consider giving the photo a PhotoID instead.
    – shoover
    Dec 11, 2019 at 4:27
  • Completely off-topic, but such an order or position is not an attribute of a photo at all. Albums have pages, pages have locations/positions/slots and photos are placed into them. The position and therefore order is an attribute of the page. each page “slot” should then point to a photo. Especially in a virtual album, a photo could appear on multiple pages. Same argument for AlbumID.
    – Jim
    Dec 11, 2019 at 6:18
  • @green_ideas thank you for explaining close-vote reason. To which SE site should this question go, then? (IMHO: it's relevant/useful for wider audience)
    – kravemir
    Dec 11, 2019 at 14:09

2 Answers 2

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I think a more specific (and technical) word for such an attribute is ordinal:

[Merriam-Webster]
1 : of a specified order or rank in a series

For instance:

AlbumID: XYZ
Ordinal: 5th
Name: Willow Tree

AlbumID: XYZ
Ordinal: 16th
Name: Abandoned Building

Or you could simply use the attribute Ordinal and just give a number without the traditional st, nd, rd, th and so on suffixes.

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  • Thank you! Looks to be exactly the word I was looking for. In other glossary a number such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, that shows the position of something in a list of things. I had encountered only alternative words, which I've mentioned in the question, but they always felt somehow a bit off.
    – kravemir
    Dec 11, 2019 at 14:12
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Sort order or just order seem to be the usual expressions for this, at least in a software context, for instance here is a Stack Overflow question.

You could try fancier terms like "collation", which refers to the process of sorting something into some order, but it is probably less comprehensible to the casual user, so "order" would be better.

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  • What about 'sequence'?
    – Ram Pillai
    Dec 10, 2019 at 11:52
  • Your own description uses the word 'position' as the assigned spot within the order of the album, "determines own position within the album."
    – Yosef Baskin
    Dec 10, 2019 at 16:19

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