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How to keep album sort order on Export / Process?

crgarcia
When I select multiple images for exporting, whether through "Export variants" or through Process Recipes, on which I set a 3 digit counter prefix for output naming, in order to preserve the album sort on the output files (whether the album sort is manual, by date or something else), the files are exported or added to the batch queue in an apparent random order, i.e., the counter does not reflect the image position / sort order which I had set on the image browser. Is there a way to keep the sort order when exporting files, apart from selecting and exporting each image individually (which is rather tedious for a 400+ image album)?

Keeping the browser sort order on exporting would seem a rather trivial and expected behavior for a program this powerful, but instead it is not what I am getting...

[EDIT] P.S.: I am using Capture One Pro 8.2 for Sony (Build 8.2.0.124), the latest version at this time.
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6 comments

Date Votes
  • SFA
    While you can sort ion the browser using "manual" to prevent any of the other sort options working I cannot see that that would be something that could be easily carried over to the output folder - the sort order is derived from other information and is not a data field in its own right.

    However with the newly extended file naming capabilities using tokens on output you can add a numeric counter token to the file name and my brief testing suggests that the batch processing will process in the order you have manually set them to so the prefix number will maintain that order when the output files are sorted by name.

    Does that help your requirement at all?



    Grant
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  • crgarcia
    Thanks for the response. Well, I didn't want to do a batch rename with the counter token because that would change the file names on the disk, and if I decide to change the order that would mess up my file backup system, not to mention that I would not be able to have different albums with distinct sorting. But anyway, I did an experiment using batch rename to add a counter at the beginning of the files and the order that these numbers were assigned was again seemingly random, not the sort order which I had set at the browser!
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  • SFA
    [quote="crgarcia" wrote:
    Thanks for the response. Well, I didn't want to do a batch rename with the counter token because that would change the file names on the disk, and if I decide to change the order that would mess up my file backup system, not to mention that I would not be able to have different albums with distinct sorting. But anyway, I did an experiment using batch rename to add a counter at the beginning of the files and the order that these numbers were assigned was again seemingly random, not the sort order which I had set at the browser!


    I was thinking more about using the numeric prefix on the files when you make the outputs using the Process routine. At that point you are creating new output files to no immediately obvious issue with existing backups.

    My brief test produced output through in the order that the images appeared in the browser having selected the Manual sort order in preference to the other Browser display sort order options.

    As far as I know and have seen over the years the Output batch process will load and process in that order - but that has nothing at all to do with renaming of course.

    HTH.



    Grant
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  • crgarcia
    [quote="SFA" wrote:
    I was thinking more about using the numeric prefix on the files when you make the outputs using the Process routine. At that point you are creating new output files to no immediately obvious issue with existing backups.

    My brief test produced output through in the order that the images appeared in the browser having selected the Manual sort order in preference to the other Browser display sort order options.

    As far as I know and have seen over the years the Output batch process will load and process in that order - but that has nothing at all to do with renaming of course.


    That's exactly what I was trying to do in the first place. The problem was that when I hit "Process" the selected variants were NOT added to the batch queue in the same order that they appeared in the browser, but in an apparently random order (not really random because it was repeatable between jobs, although I could not find what sort criteria was being used), and that random order was reflected on the numeric counter prefix.

    Since your reply saying you had no problem, though, I decided to do some more experimenting and I discovered the problem ("random" batch queue order) happened when i used a Smart Album, and not a regular album. So, although I could manually sort the Smart Album, that sort order was not preserved on export or process. So it appears it is a bug in the smart album functionality.

    For now I will, as a workaround, just manually filter a regular album instead of using smart albums, while I raise a support issue. Thanks for the replies!
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  • SFA
    Hmm.

    Glad you found the source of confusion.

    I'm struggling to match the concept of a "dynamic" Smart album with the concept of a manually defined sort order but will be interested in what the development team can come up with as a response.


    Grant
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  • crgarcia
    Well, there is the possibility of manually sorting a smart album, which you could easily do prior to processing, for instance, if you want a particular order on your outputs, but it could also be sorted by date, for example. The way it works now (the problem I described), exporting the variants will not reflect that ordering, whether manual or by date. Anyway, I have already raised a support issue, and they will be forwarding it to the R&D team.
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