P: Develop presets not sorting correctly

The Lightroom Classic CC team is aware that there are still some sorting issues and are working through it for the next release. We appreciate your patience. 

It's not clear to me if this issue is fixed or not. Many of the presets are not in alphabetical order but I'm not sure if they were designed to be so ordered. See the following post from about three months ago by Nathan Johnson:

"Nathan Johnson

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OK - I think I've solved this little mystery... it doesn't have anything to do with High Sierra (it's happening to me on El Capitan) BUT with the XMP presets conversion (and differences in convention between the .lrtemplate files and the .xmp files). 

Inside an .lrtemplate file, there are two name properties... "internalName" and "title"... when you initially create a preset file, they are both the same. But it is possible for the "title" to become different than the "internalName" (especially for preset developers who are editing .lrtemplate files directly). 

Example of .lrtemplate file:




So here, I must have changed the title directly in a text editor.

In any case, this didn't matter, because ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF LIGHTROOM only looked at the "title" property to determine how to sort presets.

Enter LR Classic 7.3 and the .xmp conversion...

XMP also has a number of properties related to the name of the preset. The "Name" property is the displayed name...

BUT... XMP has a "SortName" property. And this property determines how Lightroom actually sorts the presets.

When LR 7.3 converted .lrtemplate files to .xmp files, it took the "internalName" and placed it in the "SortName" property... 

Example...



AND unlike all previous lightroom versions, the .xmp presets actually do get sorted by the sortName property... 

So now, inside Lightroom Classic, you see presets that are mostly sorted, but with seemingly random deviations from that sorting...



All that to say, I wish that Adobe hadn't assumed that we wanted the internalName to now be used a sorting device (which it never had been before). But I don't think it is cool that now we have the ability to do custom orders without changing the display name!

Now... I've got a lot of presets to update..."

Here is a sample of what I am seeing in LR CC 7.4 after updating.

New Develop presets I create with LR 7.4 are out of sort order. It looks like they are being placed near the bottom of the folder list. I just created two presets shown below inside the red outline. I used John Ellis' 'Fix Presets' plugin with 7.3, which fixed the preset sort order. It's my understanding with LR 7.4 this plugin shouldn't be needed.

> I still have Presets scrambled all over the place.

Can you give examples Christine? Screenshots would be ideal. They've fixed the obvious issues, but there clearly could still be some outlying situations they haven't caught yet.

I am sticking with 7.2 until this situation is resolved.

I still have Presets scrambled all over the place.  I now have went back AGAIN to the version that works.  When is this getting fixed please!!!! (June 24th)

This should be very helpful to Adobe as they continue to evolve LR Classic CC going forward. They seem like reasonable and useful features.

Nothing more than a consistent folder system (we can consider preset groups are folders) so you can delete/rename/create folders independently from their content, and all actions accessible *at the same place* (right now new=create new preset to create parent group (!), rename=right click, hide=manage window, unhide=manage or right click).
Concerning sort, alphabetical order is fine as long as *all* groups are sorted even the default ones. If you can't do that, instead allow custom sort.

Grégory, you have registered your complaint. Now, as a developer could you offer your clear advice on what you'd consider to an acceptable implementation that would meet your needs and expectations.

Presets should sort alphabetically. You cannot choose another kind of sort yourself.