I can only return the thanks for your continued feedback!
Sorting is a difficult topic; at the moment, all metadata values are strings. As such, they are sorted as strings so ‘3’ is, indeed, greater than ‘1130’; to align string and numerical sorting numbers must have the same number of digits, so you could work around this by writing ‘0003’ instead of ‘3’.
It has been our plan from the beginning to allow for an arbitrary number of types. In particular, we’re planning to add support for numbers, complex dates, and names. Adding these types will mean adding custom widgets for input, formatting changes and, most importantly, support for sorting.
Having said that, a value like ‘Beirut 2898’ is clearly a string, so adding real number values does not actually help much. We will be looking to add more advanced Unicode collation sequences to Tropy which will help us support cases such as yours. This specific issue is being tracked here.
Regarding your second question: We’ve been thinking how best to add photo information to the item table; it’s not immediately obvious how it would work, because you can have multiple photos per item. In any case, if you import the photos in the ‘correct’ order you can subsequently use the ‘Date Added’ column to sort the items in this way.