Sort order for Pics

[wrems]

Is there a way to set sort order differently as one drills down into a photo collection? Right now it seems that the sort order is global.

Right now I have physical folders set up for YEARS:
\2009
\2010
\2011
etc...

Within each of the YEARS folders are subfolders for each MONTH:
\2011 - 02
\2011 - 03
\2011 - 04
etc...

If we go or do something of significance in a particular month, I create a folder with an explicit label and only those photos belonging to that event are placed there, otherwise the photos fall into the regular month folder. Sort of as a general catch all. So for some months I have 2 or more folders:
\2011 - 04
\2011 - 04 California Vacation
\2011 - 04 Grandma’s Visit
etc...

I really like my organization since it’s very easy to drill down into and find what I’m looking for regardless if I’m using windows explorer, SageTV, Picassa or whatever.

My problem is with the sorting of my collection at the various levels. Sort Up By Filename works great for keeping the folder names in logical ascending order so they can be drilled into. This makes navigating the years, months and special occasions a breeze. But the setting Sort Up By Filename applies to everything including the actual pics. This is fine when only 1 camera is concerned. If one is commingling several peoples cameras/pics from a vacation it gets a little tricky.

My desire is to sort the actual pics for say a slideshow in Sort Up By Date, while leaving the folders in Sort Up By Filename. This way regardless of the naming convention used by a camera the pics will seamlessly merge together as if they were shot from the same camera, yet be sortable by Filename to still select a particular camera’s point of view.

The reason I bring this up is that I just got back from a vacation in southern California. Pics were taken from various camera’s so they all have different conventions. I could rename them but that would be a pain and I would lose the differentiation of each person’s POV.

Is there a way to permanently assign a sorting sequence like this?

[matt91]

So I'm not exactly sure if this addresses your question. However, it's related, so I'll toss it in here.

I have a very similar photo archiving system - by year and month. I also have the same problem of multiple cameras being used. At one point, I found a small command line program that would read in the EXIF date of an image, and let you assign a date/time offset that would apply to a whole set of images.

In this way, you could fix the dates from all cameras to a know date/time so that the pictures of the surprise birthday party, for example, don't show up from the "west coast" camera before the "east coast" camera. They'd all be sorted together regardless of who took them.

I have of course lost this little program and would love to get it back. Any one heard of it, or know of a similar functionality someplace else?

Matt

[wrems]

That would be slick! I thought I was going to achieve something similar with the sort method above. I thought it was working, but not as integrated as I would like the pics still come out in blocks and not necessarily real-time. Close enough but the software you describe sounds like the ticket. I'll do some digging and see if I turn anything up. Thanks for the heads up on that!

[wrems]

This one sounds like it might work:

http://www.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html

Haven't tried it but actually would solve my issues with the sort sequence at the various levels. Not a bad idea to actually rename the files to the date especially if changes are made to the photo the order will remain constant.

[wrems]

Matt,

I just used the above software and it worked perfectly. When I set out to merge these photos into 1 seamless collection I wasn't taking into consideration the time-zone shift and the fact that not everyone's camera was set to the proper time. That software did a quick and easy job of dealing with all the time discrepancies.

Highly recommended!

[stevech]

What I'd really like is for Sage to have "show folders with photos never viewed", where Sage could keep a tell-tale file in each photo folder with last-date-viewed. Not a database, simply a file with the date of viewing. Folders that have no such file, or a file older than the youngest photo file, would be in the "show folders with photos never viewed" list.

With a lot of family photos in the emails and frequent copying from camera to stash, and quickly stored for later viewing, this would be a huge help.

[wrems]

I could see that being helpful too. In addition, a mechanism like that or other that would make sure the photo slideshow/screensaver didn't start repeating until it makes it through all the photos first.

On my system it seems like the random screensaver slideshow displays the same set of photos over and over. There are something like 6000 photos to choose from too It would be nice to have less repeats...

[Fuzzy]

You might also look at using a different importing program. Many will allow naming by date and tag, and get rid of the 'useless' naming that the cameras use. I'd have to verify, but I think Windows Live Photo Gallery can do it this way - and it's free. When you import from a camera, it groups the images by date/time taken, so it's easier to tag the different events appropriately. There are a lot of options for how to name them, but I'm pretty sure Date + Tag is one of them.

Of course, this doesn't encessarily work for your existing images.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by stevech

What I'd really like is for Sage to have "show folders with photos never viewed", where Sage could keep a tell-tale file in each photo folder with last-date-viewed. Not a database, simply a file with the date of viewing. Folders that have no such file, or a file older than the youngest photo file, would be in the "show folders with photos never viewed" list.

With a lot of family photos in the emails and frequent copying from camera to stash, and quickly stored for later viewing, this would be a huge help.

Is there an effective way to nominate the above for Sage to consider - gauge demand and decide if it goes on the to-do list?