Lightroom/Smugmug sorting question

jfriend

I am looking for a way to sort images in Smugmug first by rating and then for images with the same rating by date/time taken.

I use Lightroom and Smugmug. Throughout a sports season, I rate all my keeper images with 1-5 stars in Lightroom. When I put a season-ending gallery up for a sports season, I want the images to go into a gallery sorted first by rating, then by date taken (for images with the same rating). This puts the best images at the start of the gallery and for images with the same rating, it keeps them chronological and if there are sequences of images with the same rating, it keeps them in sequence. I cannot find a way to do this in Smugmug. Does anyone have any ideas?

Smugmug will not even acknowledge that an image has a rating so there's no way to directly sort by the rating.

So, in Lightroom, when I export, I add a number onto the front of the filename that is the rating so a 5 star image has a filename like 5-JF2-1234.JPG. I can then get a sort by rating by telling Smugmug to sort by filename in descending order. The problem with that is, images with the same rating are then in the opposite order I want because descending by filename puts newer images before older images. I also had the problem of the filename number wrapping during the season. I fixed that by putting a date code into the filename, but while that solves the wrapping issue, it's still a backwards date sort for images with the same rating.

So, I'm still back at square one. How do you get images on Smugmug sorted first by rating and then by date taken within the same rating?

FYI, I've repeatedly requested that Smugmug actually support sort by XMP rating as a gallery sort option, but nobody at Smugmug has even hinted that they are thinking about supporting it.