Question on memory card backups

[zeldon50]

Hi All-

I have my memory card backups stored on a separate drive from my lightroom drive. When I access them from lightroom, they are listed in random order: "Imported on August 10, 2019

                                                                               Imported on July 6, 2017

                                                                               Imported on January 10, 2021" etc.

IOW, they are in random order. It is a pain to attempt to locate a particular backup. Is there a way to sort them in some sort of chronological order? Maybe the obvious escapes me, but I haven't figured out a way.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[dj_paige]

August comes before January when you use text names to represent dates, because all sorting is done alphabetically. You want to use YYYYMMDD as numbers, for example, 20210914 and then these will sort in chronological order.

[Conrad C]

Were the backups created by the “Make a Second Copy to…” backup option in the Import dialog box in Lightroom Classic? If so, then the problem is the way Lightroom Classic automatically names the backups. For some reason, Lightroom Classic names them in a way that makes chronological sorting impossible in a folder window sorted by name. Unfortunately, that naming method cannot be changed. On the computer desktop, one thing to try is sort the folder window by date created, but that won’t work in the Lightroom Classic Folders panel because that sorts only by name.

That was one reason I stopped using the import backup feature: If I did need to restore from those, it is too complex to restore a large number of images from the import backup to the actual folders that the images were imported to*, and the non-chronological way that Lightroom Classic records the date in the folder name only complicates that further. Instead, I now update the complete backup of all photos immediately after importing new ones.

*This is because the import backup feature does not arrange the backups using the same folder structure as the Destination settings.