[KPhotoAlbum] Sorting several folders

[Jan Kundrát]

Vitus Jensen wrote:
> I'm working with some thousand photos from a trip together with a 
> friend.  I've used 2 folders "my" and "his", his are a little special as 
> they were taken by an analog camera and digitized later (so EXIF dates 
> aren't correct).  Everything is tagged "iceland" and should be ordered 
> chronologically when selected by location, so I editied date infos via 
> Ctrl-1.  Worked well in the beginning but now I moved some photos by hand 
> for a slide show and just noticed that all his photos are again at the 
> end (but Ctrl-1 is still "correct") :-(
> 
> Which timestamps are used to sort (EXIF has still the incorrect date)?

KPhotoAlbum has its own database of image dates, and that's what you see 
when you press Ctrl+1. It has two fields for dates, the start_date and 
the end_date. This is handy for implementing a "fuzzy-dating" where you 
don't remember the date exactly, like "this image is from mid-1999".

When you import images into KPA, this database is populated from the
information embedded in the file [1]. From that moment on, the record in 
database lives independently from any in-file info -- when you adjust 
any of the in-file properties like EXIF timestamps using a third-party 
tool, KPA won't notice that [2].

On the other hand, pressing Ctrl+1 opens the annotation dialog in which
you manipulate items in the KPA database. Anything you do here won't be 
written back to the image files [3].

> And how do I fix this?  If I resort all files the photos moved by hand 
> (and AVIs) would again need this job.  Just sorting his photos didn't 
> change anything.

Sorting is yet another different thing. Each image in KPA has its 
sequence number. View->Sort selected simply takes *current selection* 
and shuffles it so that the oldest images are at the beginning. Images 
that are not selectede are left intact. What you probably did was 
selecting just some images (perhaps those taken by you or taken by your 
friend) and running the sort thing on top of them. As you were sorting a 
sequence with holes in it, you ended up with wrong order. To fix it, 
simply select images from you and your friend *at once* and sort them by 
View -> Sort...

Cheers,
-jkt

[1] Or, as a fallback, from file modification timestamp. Unless you 
configured KPA to do it in some other way in Settings->Configure 
KPA->Metadata.

[2] You'd have to re-read this metadata from the Maintenance menu.

[3] Unless you do Maintenance -> Write metadata.

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth



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