UI: Changing order of items

[eluser]Madmartigan1[/eluser]
How do you all generally deal with the issue of "ordering" data, as far as the interface?

Example: A user wants to change the order of the photos in his photo album, so that certain ones appear before others.

90% of the time, this option is not available for whatever application, and I've seen some horrible attempts at resolving it (has anyone ever used MIVA Merchant? I hope you haven't)

Here are some options I can think of:

- Drag and drop interface
- Up and Down buttons
- Manually entering integers (terrible)

Up/Down buttons work well, but are very very annoying when the item you want to move is 30 slots away from the desired location.

The problem I ran into with drag and drop was pagination. If you want to move an item up in order, I couldn't find an elegant way to move it to the previous/next page.

Comments/Suggestions/Examples?

[eluser]WanWizard[/eluser]
Most sites, p.e. facebook, use a thumbnail view of the album for album management. This makes it easier to have them all on one page.
You can than use drag&drop;to move them around, and click to display a pop-up menu with actions like rotate, delete, etc...

[eluser]Madmartigan1[/eluser]
A separate interface exclusively for managing display order, probably the easiest solution but maybe not the best.

I actually never noticed that option on FB until you pointed it out (:
It makes sense for photos, but I can see it being awkward for other types of data, like a large list of employees.

The real problem I guess I'm running into is [the need for] pagination. Thanks for the reply.