"sort by" in Preview

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Level 1

4 points

"sort by" in Preview

Is there a way to get Preview to automatically sort multiple images by filename? I had used Preview on my PowerBook G4 for years with no problems viewing images (OS X 10.3.x), but now that I've got a new MacIntel with 10.4.7, whenever I open multiple images in Preview, the first two or three are what I would expect to find at the top, but then the file order jumps around and apparently has no order. I can ctrl-click to set it to sort by name, but "name" is already checked when I do that. So now when I want to view my photos, instead of apple-A, apple-O, I'm having to apple-A, apple-O, ctrl-click, move down, click. Since I do this a lot, it gets really old really fast. I just want my low numbers at the top and high numbers at the bottom. Any suggestions? Do I need to go back to an older version of Preview?

17" mac book pro / 15" powerbook g4 / mini / g4, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 20, 2006 6:52 AM

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Answer 1

Dr. Smoke

Level 9

56,586 points

Aug 20, 2006 4:26 PM in response to samiam00

Hi, samiam00. Welcome to the Discussions.

This is a known issue with Preview. It seems to occur most often when one selects a discontiguous collection (in the sense of left-to-right, top to bottom) or random collection of images in a folder in Icon view, whether or not the folder containing the images has been set to be arranged by name, i.e. Finder > View > Arrange > By Name.

You might get better results by selecting the images in a folder in List view sorted by name. This seems to consistently produce a Preview window where the thumbnails are sorted by name.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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