# Re: collections - manual sort order



## Anti (Jul 20, 2009)

*collections - manual sort order*

This question is not about sorting the photos within a collection; it is about manually sorting the 'collections list' itself. I'm trialling lightroom at the moment but have doubts because my intended/preferred method of cataloguing doesn't seem to be supported:

My photos are basically just snaps of family and friends, and so every few weeks or months I intend to import photos from my camera to one folder on my laptop.
I will create the folder with the chronological naming format: '2''9-'1-15 - 2''9-'3-25'.
Since each folder is named differently, I don't need to worry about duplicate file names or
name templating, and it gives a nice chronological list in both windows and lightroom.

I then intend to click on the new folder in the lightroom 'folders list' and then select the first handful of photos in the grid 'by event'. In other words maybe they're of a BBQ or party, or day at the beach, or a vacation. I add these to an appropriately named collection. Then I'll select the next handful, and add them to their own collection. 

So my collections start to look like this:
Events by year &lt;---- parent collection-set
&gt; 2''7 &lt;---- collection-set (collapsed)
&gt; 2''8 &lt;---- collection-set (expanded)
-- BBQ
-- xmas holiday
-- day at the beach
-- party
&gt; 2''9 &lt;---- collection-set (collapsed)

The problem is that the collections can't be manually ordered (or in fact ordered at all).
For instance, the party was in January, so it should be first in the 2''8 list, and I'd love to be able to manually drag it up there. 'Xmas holiday' should of course be last.

Am I missing something? I thought it would be crucial for users to be able to sort collections by a variety of parameters, or at least just to manually sort them. It seems really strange that they are only capable of being sorted alphabetically?

Although my example is simplistic, in reality there could be 6'+ collections per year (we're collating and sharing between different family members and friends), and it's important for me to have them chronology mapped-out properly during each year when looking at the collections list.

Thanks for any confirmation of this limitation, or ideas for workarounds.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 20, 2009)

Hi Anti, welcome to the forum!

That's an interesting way of doing it. My initial thought would be to use keywords for that kind of setup, and just search when you want to find a specific photo or set, but collections could work too.

No, you're right, you can't do a custom sort order on collection - it's alpha-numeric. You could add numbers to the beginning of each collection name though, ie. '1-'1 News Year, '7-'4 BBQ, 12-25 Xmas. That's probably your simplest solution within the year groupings that you want to set up.


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## Anti (Jul 20, 2009)

Thanks for your reply.

&gt; That's an interesting way of doing it

I'm surprised you find it unusual. I'd have thought it was quite an obvious way for a home user to try to organise their family albums; kind-of-like how old-fashioned, printed photo albums might be created and archived. I also just assumed pro photographers would need flexibility with sorting their generally massive number of collections.

&gt; You could add numbers to the beginning of each collection

I thought of that, but my initial reaction is that Lightroom is a little bit too expensive to be adding numbered prefixes! lol. But thanks for your confirmation that I'm at least not missing a 'sort by' setting somewhere. I notice the 'folders' list is also only alphabetically sorted.

&gt; My initial thought would be to use keywords for that kind of setup

I thought about that too, but opted for collections for the following reason: The 'library filter' seems to only be a very temporary way of selecting photos, which forces me toward using hierarchical keywords. However, that means I'm left basically using the 'keyword list' as an improvised menu, which isn't particularly elegant or robust, and means I can't use keywords for their 'proper purpose'. Using keywords as a menu would also make sharing and receiving photos with my family slightly more tedious.

Oh well. I guess there isn't a perfect solution.
It isn't a show-stopper; it just means I have to put extra effort into doing some tasks.

Thanks.


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## Anti (Jul 21, 2009)

OK, I've tried some various other approaches today, and found one that I quite like:

I'll have a smart collection for each year (ie. 2''9 -&gt; range '1/'1/'9-31/12/'9)
When I click on these, I get an list of all the relevant photos in the grid, sorted by date.

Now, instead of grouping them into actual collections, this time I'll highlight each grouping
and add the group's description to the metadata 'title' field.

Because the title can be displayed in the thumbnail, I can then to scroll through the grid
chronologically whilst being able to identify the groupings easily, which is what I wanted.

This has several good things about it:

· The grouping titles become searchable through the text filter
· I can get the groupings (titles) to appear in slide shows if I wish
· The 'i' key displays/toggles the grouping info (ie. the title) in loupe view
· It's just as quick to add a title to the images on import as it is to create collections
· The titles seem to be embedded into the image, and so are available to
family when I share my photos
· I can use keywords as they were intended
· My collections window will be less cluttered

Thanks.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 21, 2009)

Nice solution, well done Anti


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## Roy Mathers (Jul 21, 2009)

I might be missing something here but, if the files and folders are named with the date first - 2''9-12-25 - wouldn't they automatically be listed in chronologically (which is what I thought was the aim)?


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## Anti (Jul 21, 2009)

The folders are only 'chronological' indirectly though; they are actually sorted by name.

My aim was to get folders or collection LABELLED descriptively, and yet be able to move
them around and reorder them in a way that helps me BROWSE through them intuitively,
because my memory prefers chronology.

But it's not just for chronology. For instance, if the collections could be reordered,
a user could group 'Barry's party', 'Gary's party', 'Larry's Party' and 'My Party' together if they wanted, as opposed to creating a collection set for 'parties', or labelling them 'party Barry', 'party Gary', etc.

However, due to the limitations I obviously can't use the collections for browsing in that
manner. Instead I'll have to use the grid and titles. It's no big deal, just not ideal.

Thanks for your input though.


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## Denis Pagé (Aug 13, 2009)

[quote author=Anti link=topic=7278.msg4957'#msg4957' date=1248'898'1]
I will create the folder with the chronological naming format: '2''9-'1-15 - 2''9-'3-25'.
[/quote]

I may be a little late on this... But it seem that your style is little like in the old days where we were finding images by folder names. In this case, you can do something similar to your actual workflow *at import time!*

When you import a card containing images taken at different dates, as you already use the "by date" template, you are seeing in the dialog box something like:
2''9-'1-15__________x images
2''9-'3-25__________x images

Before going any further, double-click the date and append the event's text to the dates. Then, in Lightroom's folders view, you will see:
2''9-'1-15 Party
2''9-'3-15 BBQ
and so on.


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## MarkNicholas (Aug 14, 2009)

[quote author=Denis Pagé link=topic=7278.msg51576#msg51576 date=125'2'2379]
[quote author=Anti link=topic=7278.msg4957'#msg4957' date=1248'898'1]
I will create the folder with the chronological naming format: '2''9-'1-15 - 2''9-'3-25'.
[/quote]

Before going any further, double-click the date and append the event's text to the dates. Then, in Lightroom's folders view, you will see:
2''9-'1-15 Party
2''9-'3-15 BBQ
and so on.
[/quote]

This is exactly what I do. Also on my hard drive within this main folder I have subfolders such as CR2_files (in which the RAW + xmp files are stored), Jpeg_144'px_LR (in which I store any saved ...i mean exported...jpeg files. I also have another subfolder called xmp_files in which I back-up my xmp files from time to time.


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## Denis Pagé (Aug 14, 2009)

I don't see the point of keeping the JPEGs as you can recreate them as needed... Someone else in the family need them to see? : 

Also, I wonder why you backup XMP files? To be able to step back? If this is so, then you just have to go back at the wanted step in history to get to any XMP that you want to recreate...

And most important, any backup should be on a different drive in case of failure. :icon_idea:


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## MarkNicholas (Aug 14, 2009)

[quote author=Denis Pagé link=topic=7278.msg51584#msg51584 date=125'214418]
I don't see the point of keeping the JPEGs as you can recreate them as needed... Someone else in the family need them to see? : 

Also, I wonder why you backup XMP files? To be able to step back? If this is so, then you just have to go back at the wanted step in history to get to any XMP that you want to recreate...

And most important, any backup should be on a different drive in case of failure. :icon_idea: 
[/quote] 

Each to his own . I like to have ready made Jpegs which I can quickly view in other applications. Compared to RAW file size they are quite small.

With the xmp files sometimes I create say 2'' b&w photos. Yes I save as VC and as snapshot but I use two computers. It is easier for me just to back-up the xmp files (say xmp_colour) and then replace with my xmp_b&w and then re-load (read metadata). It is much quicker than individually going to history / snapshot and then selecting each one.

ALL this (including Jpegs and backed up xmp files) are also backed up on other drives. Yes its a bit of belts and braces but thats me.


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## Denis Pagé (Aug 14, 2009)

Frequent browsing in other applications, fast transfer of develop settings to another place... OK. Now I see...


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## Roy Mathers (Aug 14, 2009)

[quote author=MarkNicholas link=topic=7278.msg5158'#msg5158' date=125'21'8'3]
[quote author=Denis Pagé link=topic=7278.msg51576#msg51576 date=125'2'2379]
[quote author=Anti link=topic=7278.msg4957'#msg4957' date=1248'898'1]
I will create the folder with the chronological naming format: '2''9-'1-15 - 2''9-'3-25'.
[/quote]

Before going any further, double-click the date and append the event's text to the dates. Then, in Lightroom's folders view, you will see:
2''9-'1-15 Party
2''9-'3-15 BBQ
and so on.
[/quote]

This is exactly what I do. Also on my hard drive within this main folder I have subfolders such as CR2_files (in which the RAW + xmp files are stored), Jpeg_144'px_LR (in which I store any saved ...i mean exported...jpeg files. I also have another subfolder called xmp_files in which I back-up my xmp files from time to time. 
[/quote]

I didn't know this Dennis - thanks.


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## Denis Pagé (Aug 14, 2009)

[quote author=Roy Mathers link=topic=7278.msg516'6#msg516'6 date=125'256'48]
I didn't know this Dennis - thanks.
[/quote]
Thanks to LG Mark Sirota who suggested that recently...


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## Mark Sirota (Aug 14, 2009)

Thanks Denis, but I didn't know about this until Doug Young told me about it. And then Sean said, "What? You haven't read my book?"  

Details in this post in Tips & Tricks.


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## Scott.in.au (Aug 23, 2009)

[quote author=Roy Mathers link=topic=7278.msg49687#msg49687 date=12482'8636]
I might be missing something here but, if the files and folders are named with the date first - 2''9-12-25 - wouldn't they automatically be listed in chronologically (which is what I thought was the aim)?
[/quote]

Except its alphabetical not chronological. The following list is another consequence of that:

April
August
December
February
January
July
June
March
May
November
October
September

... which hurts my eyes! I agree with another poster who gently put it that LR is too expensive to be adding digits in front of this list to have it ordered "correctly". Of course the FOLDER list should allow manual ordering by drag and drop. Of course it should also be possible to alphabetize. How about a simple right-click option hanging off the FOLDER header bar?


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## Andrew Hayton (Aug 23, 2009)

You could submit a request to Adobe


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## Roy Mathers (Aug 23, 2009)

If the folders were named as I suggested (eg 2''9-11-'1), they would be listed chronologically surely?


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## Vingolfer (Mar 13, 2012)

Unfortunately, manual sorting isn't available with Lightroom 4, either. I have submitted a request to Adobe. Please vote for "my" idea if you think manual sorting should be possible:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_4_manually_sort_collections_list


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