How do I sort folder of jpegs by orientation?

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Level 1

5 points

How do I sort folder of jpegs by orientation?

I need to resize 10,000+ jpegs to a square format. I have set up separate Photoshop Action Scripts for the images that are Landscape orientation and Portrait orientation.

My question:

Is there a way to select only the portrait or landscape oriented photos so that I can place them in seperate folders to run the appropriate Photoshop script?

I have tried cmd-F > with a search attribute of 'Orientation' but that didn't give me the expected options.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Nov 10, 2011 12:07 PM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Nov 10, 2011 12:09 PM in response to fordjoe

http://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop

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Answer 2

fordjoe Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 10, 2011 12:22 PM in response to baltwo

Thanks,

But this is not a Photoshop question. This is a finder question. I know how to get Photoshop to do its part of this job. What I don't know is how to separate a bunch of photos based on their orientation.

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Answer 3

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Nov 10, 2011 12:41 PM in response to fordjoe

AFAIK, Finder doesn't recognize orientation; that's a PS item. If I'm wrong, then ignore my last.

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Answer 4

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Nov 10, 2011 1:28 PM in response to fordjoe

I have tried cmd-F > with a search attribute of 'Orientation' but that didn't give me the expected options.

Try settiing "Orientation equals 1" to find the portraits and "Orientation equals 0" to find the landscapes.

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Answer 5

Nov 10, 2011 2:08 PM in response to fordjoe

With the folder open and active, set it to Icon view, then press Command-J - that will open View Options for that window. In the View Options window checkmark the item "Show Item Information". This will add the dimensions for the image underneath its name in the folder's window. You can use that info to determine its orientation.

I realize this works best for a modest amount of images; a folder with several thousand can be inconvenient to parse this way. On the other hand, if the extra info is considered to be part of the filename, it may make using a script easier (if x is larger than y, etc.).

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Answer 6

fordjoe Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 10, 2011 2:18 PM in response to jsd2

Thanks jsd2. That worked like a charm! You might be the only person to know that trick, because I've been Googling this problem all day.

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Answer 7

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Nov 10, 2011 2:46 PM in response to fordjoe

Glad it worked!

Actually I had never heard of this before now.

What I did know is that the Terminal command mdls will return a list of a file's metadata attributes that are indexed by Spotlight. When I used this command on a portrait photo file, the list of metadata attributes included

kMDItemOrientation = 1

and when I used mdls on a landscape photo, that attribute was reported as

kMDItemOrientation = 0

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