sorting defect or my misunderstanding?

[ricknun]

I have an Album (folder) containing about 200 image files, most named starting with a date in yymmdd format. For example the name 220818_HP_Laptop_Desktop.png shows the date it was taken and its subject. Aves 1.12.10 "View" is set to SORT "By album & file name" "A to Z". The image sort order seems correct except for one file (attached) named 190521_IBM_150_Extra_Engineers_1951_resize.jpg that appears as the last file in the album. There are many other files named 18* 19* 20* in the folder and I think it should be sorted with similarly named 19 files*. In case it gets lost in the posting I also included a screen capture of its meta data, that appears to be way more complicated than most (all?) of the other files in the folder. But I wouldn't think that meta data should impact "By album & file name" sorting. Is this an Aves issue or am I misunderstanding something?

[deckerst]

This particular image has a title in its metadata. You can see that at the very top of the Info page (and also on the viewer top overlay), it shows "IBM Advertisement in Fortune magazine...", and Aves favours metadata titles over the file names. So here "IBM Advertisement in Fortune magazine..." is logically sorted after "19*".

A couple of solutions:

• if you don't care about the metadata titles, you could remove them by selecting your pictures > Edit > Edit title & description > enable "Title" with blank content > Apply,
• if you want to keep existing metadata titles, you could add proper titles to the images that lack one, so that sorting would not compare apples & oranges.

[ricknun]

Regarding "Aves favours metadata titles over the file names", why?
(Particularly when the sort order is called "By album & file name" with no mention of Title or other metadata.)

[deckerst]

Indeed, it should be called "By album & item title" or "By album & item name".

In general Aves prefers well declared metadata, and falls back to file properties when metadata is missing. Same with dates. File properties are easily lost and semantically weak.

[ricknun]

Thank you for your quick reply. Changing the sorting description might make it clearer what it does, but I don't think the provided sorting order is what users want or expect. I agree with metadata being semantically stronger than file properties, but stronger than either of those is file name. It is sorted on regardless of operating system, file manager, or other image management software I use. Said another way, what users expect what you've done and would complain if it wasn't available? Versus how many users want and expect "file name" to sort on (only) file name?

[deckerst]

True. I figured that people who don't use metadata titles wouldn't see the difference, while people who do rely on them usually know what they're doing and could leverage the subtlety.

For people who absolutely need file names, I'll probably add to the Collections page the "sort by path" option recently added to the Albums page.

[ricknun]

Adding "sort by path" to the Collections page would be great, and thanks again for your replies. (Don't know if you noticed -- I am the person that requested "sort by path" for the Albums page a few weeks ago.)

[deckerst]

Haha, your name and photo looked familiar but I hadn't put 2 and 2 together!

[deckerst]

Done.

[ricknun]

Thank you!

[ricknun]

I downloaded the update from Google Play today and the change works great. Thanks again.