Wierd behavior of "sort by exif date"

[giacomo.ciani]

Hi,

I have a folder with pictures taken during a vacation with different cameras. To ensure they are displayed in the right chronological order, I sort them by EXIF date in XnView. This usually works just fine, except this time I run into a problem: some of them were taken at a rodeo with continuous shooting, and sometimes they appear in the wrong order (that you can tell by the fact that the file numbering isn't right, and that the guy who fell from the horse a picture is still riding on the next one!).

I think I have a fairly clear idea of what is causing the problem: I did notice that the pictures that are swapped always have the exact same EXIF data/time. This is possible since the EXIF information only records the time down to the second (at least, this is what XnView is showing me), and since the camera can take more than one picture per second, some of them have the same EXIF time.

However, what I can't understand is how XnView is treating this case of "indistinguishable timestamps". In fact, it would seem natural to assume it is applying a secondary rule. However, this does not seem to be the case: if I copy the a series of three of the messed up pictures in another folder, this time XnView lists them in a different order (that also happens to be the chronologically right one, but I think this might be a coincidence).

It would seem that using "sort by exif date", if two pictures have the same exif date/time, the way XnView actually sorts them is.. "undetermined" (apprently random). I think ti should, instead, use a secondary rule, like for example alphabetical order (that would at least guarantee reproducible results...).

Giacomo

[xnview]

Strange, if files are same date, then name sort is used