Sort by Date and Time
onethumb
Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
Among quite a few new features on smugmug tonight, we have a new option in the "Sort Gallery" tool: Date and Time.
Should be fairly self-explanatory, but holler if it doesn't make sense.
(And no, before you ask, I can't tell you all the other new features. I'm afraid many of them were to help improve our customer service and are "behind-the-scenes" features. They'll still make your life better, though, I promise.)
Don
Should be fairly self-explanatory, but holler if it doesn't make sense.
(And no, before you ask, I can't tell you all the other new features. I'm afraid many of them were to help improve our customer service and are "behind-the-scenes" features. They'll still make your life better, though, I promise.)
Don
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this is awesome. i've wanted this for since forever
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hey don...
works great... question: once i sort for a gallery...and then add more photos, will they automatically go in the proper place based on previous sort, or do we need to execute the sort command again, after fresh photos have been added?
thanks,
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Hi Andy,
You'll have to re-sort. Sorting is an 'event' rather than a 'setting'.
Don
And in a way, Baldy predicted this. I had been asking about the possibility of displaying the date beneath/above each photo/caption. I also asked about sorting. Baldy commented in this post
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=13125&postcount=5
So in this gallery:
http://gladlee.smugmug.com/gallery/126452
Image #5 of my wife pointing at an engagement ring was taken at 2004:05:15 10:30:18
However, because iPhoto apparently auto-rotated and re-saved the original photo, it has a modification time of: 2004:05:26 09:01:31
So, when I sort by date/time, it ends up at the end.
In my mind, with modern cameras putting in proper EXIF tags, it seems clear that sort by date/time should always mean sort by date/time of original image capture. But I will allow that maybe, somewhere, people want to sort by the time they last edited a file. But those people are wrong and should be ignored. :-}
Please please use "DateTimeOriginal" or "DateTimeDigitized" falling back on "DateTime" if those first two fields are null.
(Hrm, actually jhead shows the date modified as a field called "File date" and the original date/time as simply "Date/Time". But I don't think there's any actual field names in the EXIF headers -- it's all just based on byte position in the file.)
As Baldy mentioned, we've agonized over this for quite some time.
Luckily, we have a huge base of images to select from as test cases, and we can select images from a staggering variety of cameras.
What it boiled down to was that greater than 50% of both the images and camera models being used to take photos on smugmug were putting "1980" as the OriginalDateTime field (or whatever it's called), but nearly 100% of them were correctly using DateTime.
The problem then becomes, what do you do about Photoshop, iPhoto, and any other program that touches that field. That's a good question, and we don't have an answer yet.
So we chose the lesser of two evils. We thought that dates in this century were better than dates in the last.
Don
I just had a realization after doing a bit of Googling for: 1980 date/time exif
These people with 1980 dates that have Canon 10Ds, 300Ds (same as me!) and PowerShot 100 (again, same as me) *DIDN'T SET THE DATE ON THEIR CAMERAS*. Because I'm pretty darned sure that all of those cameras do correctly record OriginalDateTime.
Argh.
I bet if you look at what kind of cameras are turning out 1980 dates, it will include *every* kind of camera. It's user-error, not a bug in certain cameras!
Of course DateTime will have a 21st century date. Most people know how to set the clock correctly on their Mac or PC, and that's where the file's DateTime is getting set. But when a photo is downloaded to a computer is *not* the same as when a photo was taken.
Essentially you're penalizing the 50% of us who know how to use their cameras, or well, how to set the date/time on their cameras. :P
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
So better would be to examine the "created on" date, and as long as it's not set to 1980, use it, else use the "modified on" date.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
I wish it were simply "stupid people don't know how to set their VCRs" syndrome, but alas, that's not always the case.
We have cases where the time is set properly on older cameras and they just don't fill in that field properly. Sometimes it's null, sometimes it's 1980, other times it's 1969, and sometimes it's even 2000 or 2001. I have some older cameras in my closet that duplicate this, and they properly fill DateTime.
Once you dig into EXIF stuff, you realize what a truly nightmarish realm it is. Every camera manufacturer does things differently. And every piece of software does things differently. We get huge percentages of photos at smugmug with portions of the EXIF data completely out of spec and/or corrupted entirely. We do our best to recover what we can, though.
If every camera manufacturer and software producer would simply adhere to the specs and properly tag everything, we'd be fine.
As it is, we opted to go with DateTime since it was the only field that was reliably not filled with bogus, corrupt, null, or incorrect data. Initially, (some of you early smugmuggers will remember this) we actually did have an algorithm that tried to determine the best date&time to use out of the available fields (some cameras seem to have as many as 4 fields). Unfortunately, we were missing as often as we were hitting, and getting lots of complaints, so we switched. We now rarely get complaints, despite having far more customers, so I think we're on a better track.
But, like everything else at smugmug, features continue to get worked on and improved over time. We'll see what happens with EXIF.
Customer feedback like yours drives everything we do. Keep it coming.
Don