Incorrect Photo Sort Order in Lightroom 1.0
The upgrade to Lightroom 1.0 went smoothly. The thirty gigabytes of photos neatly imported and managed by Lightroom since its first beta release in January 2006 were still present in my library after the upgrade, and the shoots structure of the beta releases, replaced with folders in version 1.0, had been saved as a new collection.
Everything looked fine, yet something was wrong.
While browsing the new folder organization, I realized that the TIFF files created by Lightroom from the original RAW files were always listed at the end of the grid view when sorted by Capture Time. Investigating further, it appeared that the Date Time metadata field of these TIFF files was set to the modification date of the file and not to the date the photo was shot:
I then opened the Edit Capture Time dialog box for one of these TIFF files by clicking on its Date Time value in the Metadata panel. This showed the same correct value for both the Original Time and Corrected Time fields. Strange. I then shifted the Corrected Time field by one second and dismissed the dialog box by clicking its Change button. After that, the Metadata panel for the TIFF file showed the shifted time for the Date Time Original field, yet the Date Time field was still set to the modification date of the file:
OK. Don’t panic. After shifting the Corrected Time of the photo back to its original value, I launched a Google search: surely I wasn’t the only one encountering this issue.
Indeed I wasn’t, according to this thread on the Adobe Lightroom forums. The posters in this thread suggested a few solutions to get the sort order back to normal. Someone auto-stacked his photos by capture time then unstacked them, and this seems to have been enough to fix the sort order. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me.
Someone else assigned a color label to his incorrectly sorted images then set the sort order to File Name; after that he reverted to the Capture Time sort order, and luckily for him this fixed the problem. I tried his solution on my library, but unluckily for me this didn’t change anything.
At the end of the day, none of the proposed solutions worked on my Lightroom library. Whatever the cure, the edited TIFF files always had their Date Time field set to their modification date, pushing them at the far end of the grid view.
Until Lightroom 1.1 is out with a proper fix, I’ll sort my photos according to their file name. The resulting order is correct given that, since I’ve been using it, Lightroom has been configured so that imported images are renamed using their capture time, in the form year-month-day, followed by a sequence number.
Lucky me.
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