Sorting Folders by Date Taken

[vseera]

Hi,

I am new here and have discovered this seemingly powerful software. I have been a Picasa user for many many years and am looking for a replacement, following Google's abandonment of the product.

One simple feature I have been looking for, which none of the free/paid image organisers/editors seem to be able to do is sort albums/folders by date taken.

The files themselves may have been accessed and modified at a later date, maybe if they were edited in some way. But the original date that the picture was taken is in the EXIF info.

Now, Picasa does this very easily and will sort folders by the dates they were taken, so it's easy to see what was the last album of photos I shot.

When I try to do this in XnViewMP (and also XnView), nothing happens. The folders remain alphabetically sorted. Is there something really simple I am missing? Or is this a bug? Or just something XnView can't do?

I would really appreciate it if anyone could offer a suggestion or shed more light on this. You would make my day!
Thank you!

[XnTriq]

Welcome to the forum, vseera (-:

Folders can't be sorted by EXIF but by creation date (View » Sort by » Show header).

[vseera]

Thank you for the welcome

The problem with that is, because my folders have been copied around a bunch of times, they have messed up dates on them.

Picasa seems to solve this by just sorting the folders using the EXIF dates in the photos inside the folders. This is much more intuitive to me and I am sure a lot of others.

Is this feature something the developers would be willing to consider?

[XnTriq]

I see. Have you taken a closer look at Tools » Import and sort... and the cataloging features?

Plus (to automatically and recursively generate the full photo album sorted by date - like Picasa):
It would also be very interesting to have into this Xnview DB the "taken Date" EXIF field , to also have the ability to automatically and quickly generate the full "recursive" photo album (from data already registered into the Xnview DB) automatically sorted by taken date & time like:

Code: Select all

...
2007
  January
    1.jpg
    2.jpg
    ...
    n.jpg
  April
    1.jpg
    2.jpg
    n.jpg
  ...
2008
  January
    1.jpg
    2.jpg
    n.jpg
  June
    1.jpg
    2.jpg
    n.jpg
...

• Some ideas about categorizing images
• Catégorie/Album sur XnView Deluxe ??
• Album et catégorie (xnview deluxe)
• XnView as a photo organizer?
• View Picasa, Flickr albums
• Albums needed!
• Albums/Collections
• Here comes the Catalog
• Group by event/date accross multiple folders

[vseera]

Thank you for the information and links.

For others looking to do the same thing as me, please note that I have tried every single image organiser out there. Everything from the big shots (Adobe, Corel) to shareware (ACDSee, Phototheca) to freeware (Digikam, Faststone, XnView). That's just naming a few, I must have tried out over 20 and have gone through every program on alternativeto.net and all the internet lists I could find.

Out of all of those, only Phototheca (and of course Picasa) sort folders by looking at the EXIF dates of the images inside them. Picasa is the most polished, fast and easy to use. It is also able to change image dates for a range of images by a certain margin, instead of a single date/time value. I dislike Phototheca's iPhoto wannabe GUI and it is slow in usage and makes my AV go crazy.

I even would have sold my soul to the devil with Adobe etc if any of them worked the way I wanted.

As of now, this is not possible to do in XnView or XnViewMP.

XnViewMP gives me the most hope and that's why I am here. It's well written and fast but unusable for me for now. If anyone added this as a plugin or something to XnViewMP or can recommend another program, I would happily pay $200 for it.

[XnTriq]

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