Re: sorting by time instead of filename

John Ellis <[email protected]> writes:

> Greg Troxel wrote:
>> I prefer photos sorted by time rather than name.  (This is because
>> sometimes I used two cameras at an event and want to review a merged
>> stream, and also because when wrapping over 10000 the filenames don't
>> sort right, e.g. dsc_9999.jpg to dsc_10001.jpg).
>> 
>> I have used SORT_DATE instead of SORT_NAME, but I don't see any UI to
>> set this on the fly.  I appreciate the niceness of the code - it took
>> only 5 minutes to read the code to figure this out and rebuild.
>
> I am sorry it is not obvious, but if you click on the 'sort by XXXX' label 
> on the status bar a menu will appear to choose the sort method.

Thanks - now that you have pointed it out it is indeed quite obvious.  I
just 'knew' that this belonged as a checkbox in the 'view' menu, so
apparently I didn't see it.  I'll delete my patch....

>> It would also be cool to be able to sort by exif image-taken date, but
>> that's harder and I'm not sure it's that massively useful; my workflow
>> keeps the mod date on the files.  But, when using gimp I get a new date,
>> so it would be nice.
>
> Pulling the exif date out of images would be too slow compared to the 
> benefits in most cases, and would mean rewriting the file listing code to 
> be asynchronous.

Another approach is to use exiftool to set the mtime on the file, and
let gqview's sort-by-date do what I want:

  exiftool '-DateTimeOriginal>FileModifyDate' dir
        Use the original date from the meta information to set the same
        file's filesystem modification date for all images in a directory.
        (Note that "-TagsFromFile @" is assumed if no other -TagsFromFile
        is specified when redirecting information as in this example.)

This could also be used to adjust clock skew, similar to qphotosort.
Probably qphotosort could grow an option to set mtime rather than create
symlinks.

> The Pan view in 2.1.5 has the option to order images by exif date instead 
> of file date - but it only has limited features for interacting with files.

I am still avoiding pan view due to the necessity of non-local thumbnail
caching.  (For me, it's a security bug to write thumbnails to a
different filesystem than the images.)  I know we've discussed this
before and it's a hard problem so I don't mean to complain.

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