Well this turned out to be ridiculously easy. I figured I would need to drop into Applescript to for this as the time information is readily available but I had images of having to to do the sort in Applescript also. Not something I was looking forward to.
Then it hit me *Custom Fields* . Aperture allows you to create any number of fields and put whatever data you want into them. As long as Aperture would also sort on a custom field we were more than half way there.
Sure enough a quick test showed that you can sort on a custom field (as an added bonus custom fields also show up in the filter HUD under the *Aperture Metadata" Add Rule).
So now it was just a quick script to extract the date and time EXIF info and create and populate the custom field "Capture Time".
To sort on this:
# Add the custom field *Capture Time* to the metadata of the list view.
# In the Browser go into list view and click on the *Capture Time* field heading.
Thats it just run the script on the library to create and populate the data. Will also install this as an import action so all imports going forward have this info.
display dialog "Aperture will Start." & return & return & "Select image(s), press Continue when ready" buttons {"Continue", "Stop"} default button 1
set the user_choice to the button returned of the result
if the user_choice is "Stop" then
tellme to quit
end if
tell application "Aperture"
activate
set imageSel to (get selection)
if imageSel is {} then
error "Please select an image."
else
repeat with i from 1 to count of imageSel
tell item i of imageSel
set imageDate to value of EXIF tag "ImageDate"
set s to time string of imageDate
make new custom tag with properties {name:"Capture Time", value:s}
end tell
end repeat
end if
end tell