One of my favorite iMovie tricks was sequentially numbering stills and videos, displaying a Finder window full of these files in List view, and dragging those files into the program’s clip area where they’d appear in that numbered order—01clip, 02clip, 03clip, and 04clip, for example. Once in the clip bin, I’d select all of them again, drag them into the timeline, and they marched into the timeline in the same sequence.
I use the past tense because iMovie HD doesn’t operate this way. Instead, when you drag sequentially numbered files from a List-view window into the program, iMovie HD imports the files in the order in which they were created, with the most recently created files taking the first spots.
You can force iMovie HD to do things the old-fashioned way, however. To do so, change the files’ Finder window to Column view and drag the files into iMovie. For reasons best known to Apple, when you drag files into iMovie from a window displayed this way, the files are imported alphabetically rather than by creation date.