One topic can open into a wider discussion unexpectedly. Last week I wrote about the problems some seniors were having with organizing photographs. When displaying them in Explorer Thumbnails, the photos are sometimes sorted in artificial order. In such cases, the client usually wants to see them in the order in which they were taken. This is easily done by switching to Detail view and clicking on Date rather than Name as the sorting parameter. When switching back to Thumbnails, the new sorting will be retained. That is, the method of sorting is independent of the view chosen.

That was it. I thought it was a simple example of how not realizing how things work could impede a client’s progress. But it turns out there is more to sorting in Explorer than meets the eye. In fact, the additional sorting methods are described in the Windows help files, but for some reason, I have never seen anyone use them. Maybe that is because the un-enhanced method provided by Windows is awkward at best.

To solve my client’s original problem of sorting photographs from a trip by the city in which they were taken, a Comment could be associated with each photo and then the collection sorted on the Comment parameter. You say you have never seen a Comment column in explorer? Right click on the tab bar where things like Name, Type, Size, and Date reside. A window will open with a whole slew of other options to display by simply checking the right boxes.

Assume you check the Comments parameter. That’s fine, a column now appears under the Comments heading, but the contents are blank. This is where it gets awkward. Right click on a file and select Properties. Navigate through the tabs to find the comments window. Whatever you enter here will appear in the Detail display with the Comments tab activated. However, it seems you can only do one file at a time this way. Assuming you could select all the desired photos associated with a city, I could not find a way to assign the same comment to them all simultaneously. (Okay, so I didn’t really work very hard at it, and probably every other reader knows how to do it. That just means I will get some interesting email.)

If fact, you could use this feature as sort of a poor man’s tagging system since “Title,” “Subject,” and “Author” are available to sort on. There seems to be no reason why those parameters cannot be arbitrary keywords. That brings up another issue. “Keywords” can be set in the properties window, but I don’t see an easy way to sort on them with this technique. Getting a software program such a Adobe which has a real tagging system would be better, but that is not the point here.

Bernhard Muller indicates that he and his wife combine photographs taken on separate cameras. If the cameras are different models, then enabling the “Camera Model” parameter near the bottom of the parameter list would allow them to quickly sort out who took which pictures.

Another client has suggested using Excel to allow sorting on more than one parameter. I haven’t tried this myself, but it should work. Fill a column with images. Define other columns as various tags such as family, European trip, Christmas, dogs, etc. Then using the normal sorting functions of Excel, one can quickly re-organize whole collections and sort of multiple parameters in a hierarchy. Of course the various tags associated with each photograph must still be entered manually, but that might not be too bad. Hmmm. I might even try it. You are never too old to learn from your clients.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]digital media, photo, camera, image, sort file, comment, explorer[/tags]