# Sort by Title  or  Caption...



## jimgonz (Dec 5, 2008)

It would be great to sort by Title  or  Caption.  Or any other metadata field where the user enters the text.  I enter inventory numbers in this/these fields and would love to sort by them.  Currently, I have to manually organize my images once they are in a collection.  You can imagine how much of a pain that is.


----------



## Denis Pagé (Dec 5, 2008)

Welcome to the forums Jim!
I do not see a way to sort by caption but what about renaming per inventory numbers? Tough, that may be long to do too...


----------



## Mark Sirota (Dec 5, 2008)

Great idea for a feature request.  I can certainly see wanting to sort by JobID.


----------



## jimgonz (Dec 5, 2008)

Thank you Denis.  Yes, I thought of renaming also, but I didn't want to mess up or change my previous naming convention.  

And Yes, Mark....sorting by JobID would be great too.   Actually, that is probably where I should be putting my inventory number.

Thanks guys!


----------



## Eric H. Johnson (Oct 29, 2011)

*Sorting by Caption would be great for images of architecture and cars.*

Sorting by Caption would be useful to arrange images of cars (1935 Pierce Arrow 1245 Coupe) and buildings (1929 Seattle Tower).


----------



## Victoria Bampton (Oct 30, 2011)

Hi Eric, welcome to the forum!

Interesting usage, that's one I haven't come across before.  I'm a little stretched to think of other uses for that particular feature, so it may not reach the top of their list for some time, but by all means put in an official request on the Official Feature Request/Bug Report Forum


----------



## jimburgess (Oct 31, 2011)

In the meantime, check out the ListView plug-in by John Beardsworth. It has the ability to sort by Caption, Title, or Job and save the sorted list to a collection.


----------



## francois-l (Nov 1, 2011)

*I too had to work around the absence of this feature*

I am building a private reference collection of animals pictures, ie I collect pictures on the web and organize them based on their classification. Obviously this methods has its flaws, but I chose to use it anyway.
I need to both display the species name and sort the images based on that name:



As far as I can tell, very few fields can be used for both display and pictures sorting. Obviously in this implementation it would be logical to display the Title and sort images based on it, but the option is not available...

Among the available options, the file name could have been an appropriate choice, but not all pictures are named after the species name and I'd rather not make any changes at all to the files I download (correcting them would be very tedious anyway since I have thousands of pictures)... So I can't actually use the file name.

The only other field whose value can both be displayed and used as a sort criterion is the Label... So right now I have to set the species name in the Label field and sort the collection based on that field. The Label text is also displayed above the picture (and the caption below). I just hope there is no limitation to the number of such strings that LR can store!


----------



## francois-l (Nov 2, 2011)

jimburgess said:


> In the meantime, check out the ListView plug-in by John Beardsworth. It has the ability to sort by Caption, Title, or Job and save the sorted list to a collection.


Sorry Jim, I forgot to thank you for mentioning this interesting plugin. I will give it a try - even though I would prefer the feature to be available directly in Lightroom of course


----------



## Luzula (Mar 6, 2012)

The main reason I waited so long to start using LR was the fact that there is no option to sort search results by title/caption. And it seems that this feature is not available in the LR4 either? I work with plant pictures and have in my archives about 50,000 plant images. Often I need to quickly be able to sort search results by plant scientific names. It seems we will have to wait for this feature forever - and in the mean time get new features much less needed...


----------



## clee01l (Mar 6, 2012)

Luzula said:


> The main reason I waited so long to start using LR was the fact that there is no option to sort search results by title/caption. And it seems that this feature is not available in the LR4 either? I work with plant pictures and have in my archives about 50,000 plant images. Often I need to quickly be able to sort search results by plant scientific names. It seems we will have to wait for this feature forever - and in the mean time get new features much less needed...


Luzula, Welcome to the forum.
If you have added Taxonomic names as keywords, sorting order of a grid view is irrelevant. The Keyword List in the right pane is sorted alphabetically and as you mouse over an entry a right arrow appears that when clicked, will return a grid of that keyword set of images.  While it is still necessary to manually transfer selected Keywords to Titles and Captions, using keywords as a search vehicle is really more efficient and how LR was designed to be used. Not only do you have instant access to all of your keywords in the keyword list, you can also use keywords in Smart Collections and Publish Service Collections for developing simple or very complex search utilities.


----------

