Integral imaging (InIm) is a highly promising technique for the delivery of three-dimensional (3D) image content. During capturing, different views of an object are recorded as an array of elemental images (EIs), which form the integral image. High-resolution InIm requires sensors with increased resolution and produces huge amounts of highly correlated data. In an efficient encoding scheme for InIm compression both inter-EI and intra-EI correlations have to be properly exploited. We present an EI traversal scheme that maximizes the performance of InIm encoders by properly rearranging EIs to increase the intra-EI correlation of jointly coded EIs. This technique can be used to augment performance of both InIm specific and properly adapted general use encoder setups, used in InIm compression. An objective quality metric is also introduced for evaluating the effects of different traversal schemes on the encoder performance.