I noticed when I choose to sort images by date the get ordered by the date the image was created, e.g the exif date. is it possible to get them sorted by date of upload? I notice that the function
getImageStatistic() does sort the recent images list by date of upload.

getImageStatistic() is pulling records out of the database with it's own set of sort parameters. I know it is a subtile difference, but when you use the next_image() function, it insures that new images are also found, so it looks both in the database and to see if there are any images that have not been entered yet.

getImageStatistic() provides a number of options as to the order. One is the record ID of the image, which in escence will give you the most recent images. However, it will not show 'new' images, which is probably a bug. I think it is this latter order that you are refering to.

getImageStatistic() also works across all images, not just for a particular album so I doubt it is a good candidate for you to use unless your need is not album specific.

If you have not manually sorted your images, then setting the sort order to manual will return images based on the order they are in the database. This will be the earliest first.

There is currently no sort order that will guarentee the images in the order of the upload.

So the only way to get the images sorted in order of upload is to never set the manual order sort..
or off course set the exif date to 'today' with eg the jhead script before uploading..

anyway..don,t bother too much because I mostly sort the albums manual. I just noticed that when I wrote the per album recent images script inspired by Blair's problem in post
http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=1981&replies=3
and noticed that in a smal album sorted by date like
http://www.bertsimons.nl/zenphoto/paperworks/turtle/
the recent images by date sort order differs from the album sort by date sort order.

however I think it would be a nice feature to be able to sort by order of upload to have a 'photoblog'

It is not much of an implementation, Will add 'sort by image' id shortly.

This is now in the nightly build.

thanks!