Why does Lightroom not appear to be sorting by capture date?

[Zak833]

I am trying to organise my photos in the order they were taken. I therefore have "Sort by Capture date" selected at the bottom of the browser in Library Mode. Nevertheless, the photos seem to be all over the place in terms of chronology - not at all the order in which they were taken.

Would be very grateful if someone could suggest what has gone wrong or how to fix this. Thank you.

[Just Shoot Me]

Please show us a screen shot with the view option set to show the capture date and time in the Grid view of the library module.

[Zak833]

Sure, I am using 5.6. Is attached what you mean? It says Sort: Capture time in the grey bar at the bottom.

[Just Shoot Me · Accepted solution]

Please open the View Options, Right Click on an image and select View Options at the bottom of the pop up menu, and put a check mark in "Show Grid Extras:". Set that to Expanded Cells. Then in the Expanded Cell Extras area set the right top option to Capture Date/Time.

Then post another screen shot.

[Zak833]

Thank you @Just ShootMe I have now done this, and it has helped me to see that by and large the photos are indeed in the correct order, with 3 exceptions:

1. There are about 100 videos at the top of the catalog with capture date all of 01/01/1904, so they are out of order. Is that because video metadata does not include the true capture date 100% of the time?

2. At the very bottom of the catalog (and this is where my initial confusion stemmed from), there are about 140 videos again, this time with (correct) dates from around 2003-2005, whereas by now we're at 2016 in the order...

3. Immediately above these video are about 300 photos all with an (incorrect) capture date of 2 days ago. Background: I recently inadvertently deleted a bunch of photos that I needed to use software to recover. These 30 belonged to about 1000 total that I then re-imported into my main library, 2 days ago. Given this, I am thinking perhaps the metadata for these 300 somehow got erased/overwritten before they were recovered? If so, I would extremely grateful to learn the quickest method for me to be able to sort them back into their correct place in the catalog, ideally by editing their metadata myself.

Thank you, I sincerely appreciate the support!

[Just Shoot Me]

Sorry I know nothing about Videos and even less about videos in LR. I rarely shoot videos and on the odd chance I do I do not import them into LR. They are stored in different folders from still images shot on the same day and I use other software for them.

LR doesn't deal with videos very well from my experience, when I did accidentally import a couple. Even browsing folders that hold videos with LR import dialog make LR fill up the Video cache. So I try my hardest never to do any video importing into LR.

Maybe someone else will stop by this thread that knows more about videos in LR.

Best Wishes and Happy New Year.

[Ian Lyons]

Sadly, Lr's ability to handle dates in video files is somewhat broken (at best) non existent (at worst). Either way, there is no way you can easily sort these files correctly using Lr's builtin tools.

I've linked to a previous post that may explain things better and may offer a solution.

Video clips are not sorted by capture date

[johnrellis]

To build on the previous posts, LR does not always correctly read video metadata, and it often sets the capture date of videos inconsistently in a way that confuses sorting.  Please add your me-too vote to this bug report in the official Adobe feedback forum: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-still-inconsistent-capture-date-tim...

Lightroom: Still inconsistent capture date/time for photos and videos | Photoshop Family Customer Co...

However, you can change the capture dates of videos using the Metadata > Edit Capture Time command.  The first step is to fix any internal inconsistencies in your videos using the steps described here: Lightroom: Still inconsistent capture date/time for photos and videos | Photoshop Family Customer Co... . This will ensure that the capture dates of the videos is internally exactly that shown under each video's thumbnails.  The second step is to use Edit Capture Time to correct any capture dates that are incorrect.

[johnrellis]

3. Immediately above these video are about 300 photos all with an (incorrect) capture date of 2 days ago. Background: I recently inadvertently deleted a bunch of photos that I needed to use software to recover. These 30 belonged to about 1000 total that I then re-imported into my main library, 2 days ago. Given this, I am thinking perhaps the metadata for these 300 somehow got erased/overwritten before they were recovered? If so, I would extremely grateful to learn the quickest method for me to be able to sort them back into their correct place in the catalog, ideally by editing their metadata myself.

It's not clear exactly what's going on here, given the steps you did to recover. It may be that the photos also now have internally inconsistent capture dates (the same bug as strikes videos).    Use the same steps as those for videos to first ensure that the photos have internally consistent capture dates, and then to correct the capture dates to what you want them to be.

[Zak833]

Thank you all, very appreciative of the support here. The Metadata -> Edit Capture time solution worked a charm for all of the videos issues I reported above - every one is now in its place, which is great.

The only remaining issue was those pesky 300 photos that all have 2/3 days ago set as the capture date. I've looked at the metadata on the files themselves and it looks like that's what it's showing, so I can't think of any way of fixing other than going through each one by one and trying to find its correct place in the catalog (I might also do another data restore and compare them to what it pulls in). If anyone has any other ideas about how I might avoid doing that, it would be great to hear - otherwise, thanks again for the help!

[Just Shoot Me]

I have a simple way around part of this problem in the future, with future imports.

Set LR to create folders by Date during the importing of images/videos. That way at least all of your images/videos shot on Date XX/XX/XX will be in the same folder. Even if you have images/videos shot on multiple days on the same memory card they will all be placed in folder for each date and show in the Folders area of the LR Library module.

That is what I do and I also separate them by Years. I have main (Top Level) folders named Pictures 2006 to Pictures 2017 and then when importing images they are placed in Sub-Folders by the actual Date the images were shot on (that is IF your camera is set for the correct date and time). The subfolder creation is handled by LR during the importing.

[Zak833]

Thank you Just Shoot Me​ I appreciate the further advice. I agree having the photos sorted by year would be very useful, but was wondering why you thought it would be useful to have each one in its own date as well? Would that not be creating a fair bit of mess with e.g. 5000 subfolders?

Separately - and I apologise for the "newbie" question - but I haven't figured out yet how to import new photos from my main Pictures folder. I clicked "New" at the top but this actually just replaced the existing catalogue with a new one that only contained the new photos, rather than adding the photos to the catalog that I had added to the folder 😕

Thanks, as always.

[bob frost]

I've taken to renaming my images after import. I think 'Queen Victoria' suggested this somewhere in her blogs/books, so I rename images in LR with the images capture date and time,  Year-Month-Day (selectable in the Rename box) and Hour-Minute-Second followed by the camera model and camera internal image number.

Like this      20161231-125623-D800-1234.nef

Done like that, which is very quick in LR, I can sort on filename and they are sorted by Capture time! Down to the last second without any problems if using two or more cameras (as long as their date/time is synced).

I put them in Year folders, and in subfolders labelled by place, but you may prefer other ways of labelling the folders.

I don't do videos, so I don't have that problem unless a fat finger presses the wrong camera button!!

Bob Frost

[Just Shoot Me]

Zak833 wrote:

Thank you Just Shoot Me I appreciate the further advice. I agree having the photos sorted by year would be very useful, but was wondering why you thought it would be useful to have each one in its own date as well? Would that not be creating a fair bit of mess with e.g. 5000 subfolders?

Separately - and I apologise for the "newbie" question - but I haven't figured out yet how to import new photos from my main Pictures folder. I clicked "New" at the top but this actually just replaced the existing catalogue with a new one that only contained the new photos, rather than adding the photos to the catalog that I had added to the folder 😕

Thanks, as always.

That is just the way I do it. It's just my management style. It make finding images outside of LR easier. In LR I can look at the shot date and then use Windows Explorer to copy, email, whatever a image. Instead of looking through thousands and thousands of images I can go right to the Year, Month and Day it was shot. Not every image gets a subfolder. The Dated subfolder might hold 4 or 400 images. It all depend on how many images I shot on that date and how many I kept.

You need to click the IMPORT button at the bottom left hand side of the Library module. Then select the drive and folder your images are in and select the Add option at the top of that screen.

[Zak833]

That makes sense. Thanks very much for all the useful advice.

[Zak833]

bob frost​ Thanks for the great idea, will try that. Does renaming need to be done ON import, or can it be done in the same way after?