Thanks for the replies.
Can't you "sort within groups" by date?
Yes, but not what I was asking. The files within a group are easy to sort, it's the groups themselves I'm having trouble with.
What if you just added the year as a pane?
Yes, I do... the key here is browsing, ideally when the panes are hidden. It is good to be able to scroll through albums over a couple of years, without having a year filter on. That way I can start now, and go back as far as I want without having to reset the year filter. Similarly, by double-clicking and starting image playback, it would be good to flick through from most recent to oldest without having to stop and then select a new year from the panes.
Or used different album names for each Japan trip?
I've considered it. Unique album names certainly do have some advantages - but I decided against doing this for a number of reasons:
1. Some albums which span many years are logically grouped together and it is important, in other views at least, to be able to view them together when you need to. Nature shots for example. (Yes, I like nature shots
)
2. Adding year to the standard album field seemed redundant to me (it's already in the date field)
Or created a calculated field like [Album] - [Year] and used it for grouping?
I've tried creating a [Album] ([Year]) custom expression field. Using this as a field for grouping would definitely separate them out into years (
) but there's no way for me to sort it by date (
). Alphabetical is the only option, otherwise this would be the way to go. Would it be a lot of work to expand the (...by date) functionality to other fields?
Thanks Matt, you've offered a few suggestions and I know I've knocked them down
After considering this, it looks like it's not possible at the moment, with the current setup at least. I'm not prepared to change anything major in the library (not being lazy, it'll just break some other things if I change how I handle albums) and unless it's an easy fix I certainly don't expect you to rewrite the group sort engine for this. So I guess I'll have to deal with it or settle for filtering a year at a time...