Gwenview - file order weirdness

[Spadge]

Hi all

Has anyone found a way to make Gwenview respect the file order setting in Dolphin?

If you have a bunch of photos you want to go through in a folder, and they are named "foobar 1.png" to "foobar 200.png", cycling through them in Gwenview will display them in the order: 1, 10, 100, 101, 102 ... 109, 11, 110, 111 ... 199, 2, 20, 200, 21 etc.

I cannot find a way to change Gwenview's file order settings. The only thing I can do is make Dolphin follow the same messed-up order by deselecting "Natural sorting of items" in the advanced settings.

Is there a way to fix Gwenview's file order?

I have checked bugs.kde.org and can find no mention.

Thanks

[Spadge]

Oh, and in case anyone wants to know ...

dpkg -l gwenview* | grep ^ii
ii  gwenview       4:15.04.1-0ubuntu1~ubuntu15.04~ppa1 amd64        image viewer

Thanks

[Spadge]

I've checked bugs.kde again and this time come up with the following: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343452

Still unconfirmed though.

[Spadge]

I had a quick look trough some of my photo folders and did not notice anything special.
Yet, my pics are numbered DCS_0001,JPG, how would it be if you renumbered in this fashion?

Sure, we could all go back to renumber our entire photo collections to fix the fact that Gwenview no longer respects the file order specified in Dolphin ...



The thing is, when you rename a batch of files in Dolphin with the # suffix to auto-number the series, it starts at 1 and has no option to auto-fill with 0s. So I would have to not only rename the entire back catalogue of pictures I have named with the previous 5 years of kubuntu, but I would have to do so individually and not in batches.

It's only since upgrading to 15.04 that this has been a problem.

[Spadge]

Yes I agree there is a problem with the numbering as you explained.

But I have several camera's that all number with leading zero's so I don't quite understand where your numbering comes from.

Pretty sure I covered that in "when you rename a batch of files in Dolphin with the # suffix to auto-number the series"

[oshunluvr]

I totally agree with Spadge that this is a super annoying "feature" of computers to sort in this way. However, I also agree with Teunis that insisting that computers behave in some other fashion may be an exercise in futility - which I think might have been part of the point. I use the command line so much, my expectation is the ASCII sort so I use naming techniques that work the way I expect them to. Of course, hind-sight being 20/20, that's not very helpful in this case, is it?

As far as renaming the files goes, I'm sure you realize there are many other ways to accomplish this other than Dolphin if that what you wanted. Obviously, what you want is for Gwenview to "behave" like it did before, but what if it doesn't? What if the developer decided ASCII sort is the "proper" sort? What if you drop Gwenview all together and some other picture viewing program uses ASCII sort? Just playing Devil's Advocate here...

In my case besides various cell phones, digital cameras, scanned photos from the photo shop, etc, of my own, my photo collection includes those subsets from my wife and kids and a few friends too! The task of sorting in any sensible fashion quickly became untenable. I eventually landed on a scheme where all my photos regardless of source are named with only with the date and time the photo was taken. This accomplished both correct ordering regardless of application in use and allowed blending sources into a logical sequence. For example: my daughters second birthday was attended by dozens of friends and family. Weeks later, I'm collecting photos from everyone. I dump them into a folder and rename them all by date/time and violã, the whole party is laid out in order. Eventually, I landed on a folder scheme of Year/Event - a full year in a folder and when appropriate, sub-folders of special events (vacations, meaningful parties, etc.).

In case any readers are interested, here's the command that automatically renames pictures into date/time:

exiftool '-filename<CreateDate' -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%le *

Obviously, you're at the mercy of the source device to have used the correct date/time but I find 90% of the time or more everything is correct enough for family photo purposes. Older archived stuff and manual scans of real photos require some manual input, but handling the incoming photos from all our modern devices is the biggest challenge.

Final comment on batch renaming: I never use Dolphin for this purpose. Krename is a very useful and powerful renaming tool.

[SecretCode]

In my opinion Gwenview is the finest viewer around, the only comparable one I see is Irfanview.

Nothing against Gwenview ... but have you tried XnView MP?

[Spadge]

The thing is, having already decided that your OS UI is going to offer natural sorting as an option in its file manager, why would your application not take that setting as a global preference?

It's not like they aren't both made by KDE; they are both key applications within the same suite of software. Inconsistency of UI design is what makes an OS look a bit shoddy. It's one of the reasons why Mac OS has always been held in much higher regard than MS Windows for its design.

I can put up with Filezilla ignoring its own setting to respect the host OS's date format setting and just revert back to the American way - it's not written specifically for the OS or UI that I'm using it in, it possibly doesn't really understand what it's being told by the host OS/UI.

Bah, it's just shoddy design, sloppy workmanship. Sure, I can shell script the heck out of every filename and make it not an issue. But really, I shouldn't have to. It's a bug and it needs to get fixed, leaving it out was an oversight that needs to be put right.

Until your OS can be shipped without a shell terminal, it's not a public-ready user-friendly consumer OS. As one pundit put it.

[Spadge]

Nothing against Gwenview ... but have you tried XnView MP?

They dropped a G in the installer, apparently it's a raphics app.

But yeah, looks like it orders files as the user wants, with an option for by name and by name (not numeric), so that's a bonus.

Looks damned ugly compared to a native KDE UI though. Was it written for Windows 95?

I'll give it a go and see how I get on with it. It's nice to know there's an alternative to the default. Thanks.

[Spadge]

SecretCode:

I hadn't used XnView in years, the MP version looks very good.

Thanks for the tip!

Spadge:I agree the present sorting method is lacking.
My experience with well worded requests to Aurélien, the GwenView dev, is very good so put in a request and we'll see!

I've added to the bug notice in bugs.kde, so no doubt it'll get looked at one day.

[NoWorries]

I had a quick look trough some of my photo folders and did not notice anything special.
Yet, my pics are numbered DCS_0001,JPG, how would it be if you renumbered in this fashion?

The way I handle numbering of photos is to use KRename and change the file name from say DCS_ to nothing. This would leave the file name as 0001.JPG and would allow up to 4 digit filenames.

With my camera the file names are 7 digits, eg P1070027.JPG. I use KRename to strip off P1070 and replace this with currently 27. This I change to 28 when the last 3 digits reach 999. In this way I never have any problems with file ordering of photos.