Sorting my shoots by date rather than by filename

[thomaso377944]

I do near-daily photoshoots, and for each shoot I create a folder titled according to the model's name, like this:
John Anderson 4.28.18
John Doe 8.4.21
John Doe 11.21.22
Joseph Jackson 1.31.15

In bridge these are ordered alphabetically by name.  Very, very often however - many times daily in fact -  I need to know which are the most recent shoots in order to complete outstanding jobs.  There are thousands of shoots and it's not a simple thing to browse for recent dates.  I have never found a way to neatly resort this list of folders within Bridge by SHOOT DATE.  Anyone have a workaround?  I've been asking for this for many years and everyone always just tells me to switch to Lightroom. I DO NOT want to lock my images into place with Lightroom and I don't want a lot of responses telling me how much better other programs are. I am specifically looking for suggestions on how to use Bridge to do this.  Perhaps there is some way to add tags or keywords to the folders or all images in each folder?  I'm lost and been frustrated by this for many years.  

[Erik Bloodaxe]

You can just change the sort order to "Date Created" instead of "Filename". Is that too simple or do I miss your point?

[thomaso377944]

As I understand it, the sort order is attached to the individual images, rather than the folder structure.  So while I can sort all of the images within a single folder by date created, there are issues when you try to organize thousands of individuals folders this way.  

The main issue is that it sorts not by the creation date of the individual images in the folder, but by the date when the folder was created, which for me typically has little to do with the date when the shoot took place.  

A second issue is that the date created sort is only in one direction, so if I have 1000 different photoshoots, rather than having the most recent appear first, I have to manually scroll down through 1000 folders to get to the most reccent content that is almost always what I am looking for.

As a result, across all the many years I've used this messy program, I've had to rely on secondary databases that I've laboriously constructed simply to keep on top of my workflow.  It's expensive and labor-intensive and I'm sick of it - why the heck cant adobe fix this glaringly obvious problem after all these years????

[Lumigraphics]

Change your naming convention.

1-1-2023 John Doe

1-6-2023 Jane Doe

[thomaso377944]

Care to explain how that will help me?

When, for example, I have John Doe here who wants to look at the work from our 8 past photoshoots over the last 5 years,  how do I find those folders?  When Jane Does asks me to review her images from our shoot in the spring, do I just manually scroll down, scanning through hundreds of shoots to find her name?

What I've always wanted from Bridge is a simple way to do both these searches - to organize by date (in descending order with most recent on top, obviously), and to organize by name of model.  

If there is some way that canging my naming convention will help me, please explain.  

Using that format, as far as I can see, Photoshop will organize them like this:

1.1. 2019 john doe

1.1. 2020 bob jones
1.1. 2021 jane doe
1.1. 2022 larry smith
2.1. 2018 jane doe
2.1. 2019 larry smith
2.1.2020 john doe
2.1.2021 john doe's brother
2.1.2022 larry smith
3.1.2017  jeff bridges
3.1.2018 walter anderson
3.1.2019 larry smith
3.1.2020 martha stewart
3.1.2021 expertis communitatis
3.1.2022 chucky cheese

To me this seems like just another laborious mess. 

[Lumigraphics]

Do you want to search or sort? I'm not clear on the problem, there is a Find command if you need to search.

[gregreser]

If you format the folder names using YYYY-MM-DD [model name], you would get consistent date sorting in Bridge, other apps, and file browsers. 

2022-03-01 chucky cheese
2022-02-01 larry smith
2022-01-01 larry smith
2021-03-01 expertis communitatis
2021-02-01 john doe's brother
2021-01-01 jane doe
2020-03-01 martha stewart
2020-02-01 john doe
2020-01-01 bob jones
2019-03-01 larry smith
2019-02-01 larry smith
2019-01-01 john doe
2018-03-01 walter anderson
2018-02-01 jane doe
2017-03-01 jeff bridges

Do you add the model's name to the image file metadata? If so, you could search for it easily.

Granted, it would be very useful if Bridge allowed you to search folder names.

[thomaso377944]

I've never added model names to metadata.

[gregreser]

Even if you had file metadata, searching across 1000s of folders would take a very long time.

I have a feeling you have already tried using the Metadata workspace and sorting by Date Created. This may not be the shoot date, but it *might* reflect the same chronology if the folders are created in the same order as the shoots. Sorry, this is just a workaround and not what you really need.