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[pcstockton]

MC World,

I have stopped using Picasa and want to start using MC for photos.

I have all of my photos in unique Folders for whatever they are:
XMAS 2009
Golf pics > Pacific Dunes
et. al.

How do I get MC to display then like that?  Ive tried playing around with sorting and whatnot to no avail.

I think I may need to rename files from Folder Name???  How do I do this?

FYI, none of my pictures are tagged.  I would simply like them to sort by Folder Name.


Thanks in advance!
Patrick

[kensn]

Can you not do that by setting up a view by File Path?

[marko]

You have many options open to you, here are some:

Create a new library field, you can call it anything you like, I called mine Last Folder. Set it up as shown below and it will populate with the parent folder of each file.


Having done that, you can now use that field as a pane, and if you like, you can group your list by it too.

kensn's suggestion is another option you could try. Adding a first pane using "File Path" will give you an expandable tree inside the pane that replicates your explorer folder tree.
There is more detail regarding this, plus other aspects of view setup, in this post.

I moved from Photoshop Elements to MC for photo management. Elements had a neat option that when selected, would sort "oldest first within days" when viewing the list in "Newest First" mode. This meant that you got the latest photos at the top of the list, but they stayed sorted in the order they were taken on each day.

To set this up in MC, you need to create another two new calculated data library fields:
1. Time expression: mid([date (filename friendly)],9,-1)&DataType=[Number]
2. Date (no time) expression: mid([date (filename friendly)],0,8)&DataType=[Number]

Use the view header menu to set sorting rules like so:
date (no time) (z-a)
time (a-z)

and voila, job done.

Just dive in and see how it feels. Tagging, while a horrible and time consuming task on photos, in any application, will give you a better over all experience.
In case you miss it, there's an option to turn of the white frame MC places around the photos if you don't like them.

-marko.

[pcstockton]

Thanks so much!!  I really appreciate the assistance.

I will give your suggestion a try.  I did try sorting by filepath but it isn't very nice looking.

I would love a list of "photo albums" thumbs, not unlike Music view, Where the name of the album is pulled from my folder names.

I just don't know how tagging really works with pics.

For example, I have a folder titled "Golf Pics", then sub folders inside for all individual courses/trips. 

Then I would love either a Panes or Thumbs view.

Thanks again!
Patrick

[marko]

I think we have all struggled with this in one form or another when trying to come up with a foundation for our image libraries. MC makes us think about it, while others decide what we need for us. I much prefer the MC approach. The thing to remember is that there really is no right or wrong, if it works for you, then it is right

A possibility for your golf pics could be to tag all of them as Golf Pics using the genre field, and then use the individual courses/trips as the album names.
As you are already quite well organised, this becomes very easy using the "Fill properties from filename" tool. Use the "Template" option, set directories as [Genre]\[Album], uncheck filename, and press OK.

Then you could easily set up the category based views you want using [Genre] and [Album]

-marko.

[pcstockton]

Thanks Marco,

That worked almost perfectly.  I will play around some more.  I think I need to revise my folder structure a little bit.

I really appreciate your help!

Have a great day.

Thanks!
Patrick

[BillyBoyBlue]

Much depends on how extensive your collection of images are, how varied, how much they are aleady "sorted" and to what extend to want to add "Tagging" and other benefits of database features MC employs. I just spent the last couple weeks redoing my library which was and still is arranged in a series of nested folders in the familar Windows Explorer format.

I'll use mine as an example. Before that a few oops things to watch for. You can let MC scan for all images, videos and music on your PC which on the surface sounds good BUT if you also have some applications that bring samples and you've loaded them on your PC that can result in unexpected results. I first did that and ended up with thousands of wav sound files, thousands more clip art and other things that while images or sounds are not something I wanted in my MC library. So you need to think a bit what you want MC to search for.

I set up a master folder I simply named Media. All the images I wanted MC to know about I placed here in many sub folders. Ditto for my videos and music. So I have three primary folders, each having many sub folders.

Specifically Archive A is images. It has 2,604 folders and in excess of 90,000 files. Now how to mange all that in MC. From the left pane locate Images, Files, click it, then walk down the tree until you find WHERE you store your files. In this example Media\images. Now you have many choices. if you click on the images folder (or whatever you called it) literally all the files regardless of what sub folder they are in will be displayed and can be sorted in several way and displayed in various formats. This is great for searching your libary if you don't know where something is. Or you can continue down the tree and open any sub folder under images and only the contents of that sub folder is displayed, just like in Windows Explorer.

So in your case you could have a folder named Golf, then sub folders for year/month or by course, location whatever you like. Now at your lesiure you can add ratings to some or all of your images or use tags. The advange of that is either can be used to restrict searching. So for example if you have photos of the 18th hole on dozens of courses you played once you tag an image regardless where it is in any sub folder in your library if you go to images\files and search for 18th hole or whatever you tag it all instances of that would be displayed if you search for such a tag. Pretty cool. Sames applies if you want to play slideshows by tag or use the DLNA ability to do same of a networked big screen tv in another room. There's many other ways to use MC, so far I found this the easiest since I still keep my file structure when I want to access the images to alter them or work on them in other ways.