Photos Active Playlist sort order?

[hartlenb]

Looking at the default 'Year' active playlist. It groups all the photos by year and then by month within the year. Sorting by year works as expected but the months are ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically (Jan, Feb, Mar, etc)?

[Paul]

I suggest you sort by "Release date".

[hartlenb]

I don't see 'Release Date' as an option? The only date related options that I see are Year or Created Date.

[Paul]

Sorry about that. Email us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com and we'll provide a patch that includes 'Release date' sorting. We'll add that into the next release also.

[hartlenb]

I installed the patch and set the playlist's sort to Release Date (descending). It didn't help. The individual photos have release dates but month subfolders have no release date associated with them so they are still sorted alphabetically.
693

I wanted to make sure that this wasn't just an issue within Mezzmo, so I went to see how the months were ordered on my device (Samsung BDP). Unfortunately, I couldn't get the playlist to load? My device times out before completing the task (I get the loading message for about 30 seconds and then a Request cannot be completed message). I believe this is because of the size of my photo library and because the active playlist seems to show all the children files for each parent branch (not sure how else to describe this).

Because I chose to sort the playlist by year then by month, I wouldn't expect to see any files until I moved through the folders and got to a specific month within that year... But this is not the case. When I select the * Photos by Year toplevel playlist, it first lists all the Year folders created by the playlist and then follows these created folders with all 9,000+ pictures (every picture I have). My device chokes here, so I can't even get to select a year. Should I be able to get through the first level into a specific year, I'd see a list of all the month folders (sorted alphabetically) and then every photo from that year (for me somewhere between 900 - 1500 photos depending on the year).

This raises two new questions on top of the original question on sorting the month folders.

2) Is there a way to turn off the listing of the aggregate files as you traverse down the active playlist folder tree? Don't list any files until you get to the last folder?
3) What's the cause of the timeout I'm experiencing? Mezzmo server is running on a AMD 2.80 GHz quad-core desktop computer that is seldom used for anything else (it's virtually dedicated to Mezzmo).

[Paul]

Make sure the "Only list files at the lowest level for active playlists" checkbox on the Options dialog (General page) is selected. This tells Mezzmo to only list files at the lowest sub-active playlists. Try browsing your active playlist again.

Samsung devices do often struggle (choke) when there are more than 999 files to be listed in a single folder/playlist. This is a limitation on the Samsung firmware.

[hartlenb]

Thanks Paul. I wasn't aware of the checkbox. As a consideration for an enhancement -- I think it would make more sense to include this as a config option under the active playlist. That takes care of problems #2 & #3. Problem 1 (or maybe usability preference) still exists --the months are being displayed alphabetically not in calendar order. I'll live with it, unless I hear back that it's been addressed.

[Paul]

Thanks for the confirmation, hartlenb. We'll look into the sub-active playlist order for Months.