Is there a way to have the post index default to image being hold or something? This hide & seek game with hold is not as fun as I thought.

Edit: Nevermind, just use "holds:only" and just keep it up.

pending:{false,true,all}
holds:{false,true,all}
deleted:{true,all}

"false" is the default in normal mode, "true" matches only those having the given pseudo tag, and "all" matches everything with and without the tag.

"{pending,holds}:only" is an alias for "true".

If you want to see everything in the added order, "pending:all holds:all order:id_desc" should do it.
Otherwise, unholding a post will bump it to the front and mix the true order, if I remember correctly.

Roadi said:Otherwise, unholding a post will bump it to the front and mix the true order, if I remember correctly.

This did threw me in loops in early days browsing here. Posts seemingly repopping with no idea why, until I somehow figured it out. The hide and seek wasn't fun here either.

Still, not all 'late' posts(ie like if you browse a section which has most posts 25 days old, there's some posts from like 29 days ago and so on) seem to be caused by bumping as there certainly are posts that I would have gotten had they appeared earlier, that I know I didn't encounter earlier, and I even hazard to guess those posts consist the majority of the 'late' posts. Only explanation I can think of is some uploads are delayed before added to the browsing index and causing it to shuffle a bit?

I adopted an approach to view new posts with a delay of about a month which should work out the kinks(most, aside from those few strays two months or so late that I sometimes encounter) without fear of the annoying duplicate warning when trying to download them...
By using 'limit:200' when browsing you can easily set how far back you want to go, index grows approximately one such page a day, so page 30 would correspond to posts appearing in the browsing index a month ago(which, when I just checked, matches almost exactly).

There's a third approach if you absolutely don't want to miss anything and don't mind being methodical. Under 'Related Posts' on a post's page, like this, there's the 'Previous/Next' links. That seems to go by the numerical digit of posts(which differs from browsing order), and it seems to go through held posts as well(when I tried). But I'm not that much of a masochist, I at least prefer to see the thumbnails before looking further...

I'm not sure about the timestamps, but when I last checked the sources the post id seemed to be the only reliable indicator of the true addition order.
Unless some admin modifies the database directly, the post id should simply keep auto-incrementing when a new post is added.
The gaps you say seeing may well be the result of some administrative actions, for example, deletions of spam or the like - just guessing, though.