Better Default Subfolder naming

[ExPro]

If you upload photos to an Eye-Fi folder on your computer, the default subfolder format is month-day-year. For the first year you use an Eye-Fi card, that works just fine. Then it becomes disorganized. For example, subfolders now are listed as 3-5-09, 3-5-10, 3-5-11, 3-6-11, 3-7-10, 3-7-11, 3-8-09..., because the month, then the day, then the year decides the order. A better default naming system would be one of the options in Eye-Fi Center> Photos> Subphoto Options> Use Custom Date Format to Create Subfolders. The simplest would be fullYear-month-day, with zeros before single digits. For example, 2011-03-05. Thus: all the 2009s from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, all the 2010s by date, all the 2011s by date. I believe this would be the default most people would prefer, since the user isn't likely to discover the ordering problem until the anniversary of his Eye-Fi card rolls around.

[jablonsky]

Agreed! Very strange choice to lead with the month, and a single-digit month at that.

Making the default folder name something that actually sorts chronologically seems like such an obvious idea, it almost makes me wonder if there's a great wisdom afoot that I missed...

[MikeV]

I agree... leading with the year would be a big improvement...

Personally, I have mine go Year\Month-Day, so my pictures from the 4th of July are in 2010\07-04, 2011\07-04, etc... and I can easily archive a year's worth of photos by dragging that one year folder to a DVD.

[berend]

I agree... leading with the year would be a big improvement...

Strange or not, what we've done so far is to use the "short date format" provided by the OS locale functions (see, for example, the "Formats" tab under the "International" preference panel) for naming the folders, as this avoids us getting into differentiating the US vs European MM/DD vs DD/MM differences. If the user chooses to customize, then we provide a fairly-flexible strftime() tokens-based date format, but we don't make an effort to map the default "short date format" to a strftime() string and then make decisions based on that. So, in short, we can't just make the default non-customized format YYYY-MM-DD - we'd have to make it YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM based on locale and then get into the sub-optimal sorting that the latter would still have...

Personally, I have mine go Year\Month-Day, so my pictures from the 4th of July are in 2010\07-04, 2011\07-04, etc... and I can easily archive a year's worth of photos by dragging that one year folder to a DVD.

Indeed. Many folks don't realize that you can include directory separator characters in the custom formats, thereby getting hierarchical organization as part of the customization.

We'll look into this some more - localization is just a bit of a pain...

Berend

[MikeV]

Well, now that it's known how you arrive at the default (based on OS regional settings), I understand why the default is what it is.

Localization makes software development fun... that's the joy of having an international product/service.