I have completed a bunch of galleries for a client. They then wanted the photos in a certain order. I told them the only way to do that is to rename the image with a order number to accomplish that. when they did that it ordered them per their specifications, but it lost all the captions and descriptions. They were not happy to say the least.

My question is this - is there a better way or can you implement an ordering process after upload has taken place so that type of problem doesn't occur.

Unfortunately if you rename the image, the captions file points to the old filename. You need to update the labels.txt file as well.