When I say "alphabetical order", I mean "alphabetical order"
5 hours ago
- #natural-sorting
- #user-experience
- #file-sorting
- The author and their dad went on a hike and took photos with their Android phones, which were named in the format IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss followed by optional numbers and .jpg.
- When viewing the photos on a Windows PC and Google Drive, they were not sorted correctly by date, with photos from one phone appearing before the other.
- Various file managers (KDE’s Dolphin, Gnome, and phone file managers) also showed incorrect sorting, while command-line tools like `ls` sorted them correctly.
- The issue was traced to different naming conventions: one phone included milliseconds directly after seconds, while the other added an underscore before milliseconds.
- Modern file managers use 'natural sorting,' where numbers within filenames are compared numerically rather than alphabetically, causing the unexpected order.
- The author expresses frustration with software making assumptions about user preferences instead of following explicit instructions.