Sort photos by dimensions

[andygohyf]

My workflow requires me to sort photos by dimensions. At least to separate portrait & landscape orientation pictures. I can do this easily with WinXP.

Anyone have any idea how I can do this in Leopard? or any 3rd party apps to do so? iPhoto, Lightroom, Aperture and even Canon DPP do not have such functionality to do so.

Appreciate your help as what I do now is transfer the files to a Win XP machine hosted on my Mac using vmWare Fusion then transfer back. This is really wasting a lot of time.

 

[BigJim]

I need this too. Loading up a digital picture frame. One frame for the landscape photos, one for the portrait photos.

In VMWare Fusion you can go to Settings and share your photo folder between OS X and the virtual XP. Maybe you're already doing this but it should make for less "moving the files back and forth".

I see in XP, one can simply, in the finder Detail view, sort by Dimensions.

This article confirms and expands on the deficiencies in sorting/grouping OS X finder... http://www.xvsxp.com/files/file_sorting.php

I can't find a way to do it in iPhoto either.

 

[GGJstudios]

Need help finding & filtering photos (.jpg)

In searching for an answer before I started a new thread, I found this thread with no solutions. Anyone have ideas or recommendations? I have the same need, to sort photos by resolution, to eliminate ones below a certain size. Also, some of the photos in the folder have "(Custom)" in the file name. But when I search the folder for "Custiom" or "*Custom*" I get no hits.... any ideas why?

 

[shecky]

Bridge CS3 will do this.

 

[GGJstudios]

Thank you for your reply! However, I was looking more for a solution like Finder... this capability is native in Windows Explorer, just by adding columns to the view. Spending hundreds of dollars on an Adobe product, just to get Bridge CS3 (which doesn't appear to be available as a standalone product) is a costly overkill, when all I want to do is be able to sort the files, not modify them.

 

[compuwar]

Thank you for your reply! However, I was looking more for a solution like Finder... this capability is native in Windows Explorer, just by adding columns to the view. Spending hundreds of dollars on an Adobe product, just to get Bridge CS3 (which doesn't appear to be available as a standalone product) is a costly overkill, when all I want to do is be able to sort the files, not modify them.

Finder->New Smart Folder->Other->Orientation->Portrait
Finder->New Smart Folder->Other->Orientation->Landscape

 

[EugeneA]

Sort photos

Well, I don't know how to do that from GUI, but if you are willing to open a terminal, you can use exiftool. Download it and install from:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/index.html

Once exiftool is installed, you can use something like the following command to list your files in the order of increasing width:

exiftool -T -s -s -s -ImageWidth -FileName * | sort -n

In the output, the first column is image width, second is its file name. Obviously, once you get the list of names, you can do anything you want with them from the command line.

See exiftool for more advanced options.

I hope this helps.

 

[termina3]

Aperture 2 does this… and more in depth than landscape or portrait

$200

 

[GGJstudios]

Finder->New Smart Folder->Other->Orientation->Portrait
Finder->New Smart Folder->Other->Orientation->Landscape

This doesn't tell me dimensions, only orientation. They're all the same orientation, but some are 96x96 and range up to 1280x800. I want to be able to sort by the dimensions.

 

[lag1090]

This doesn't tell me dimensions, only orientation. They're all the same orientation, but some are 96x96 and range up to 1280x800. I want to be able to sort by the dimensions.

You can do the same thing, just replace orientation with the "pixel height" and "pixel width" options.

 

[GGJstudios]

I really appreciate the responses, but I'm still not getting what I'm looking for. For one thing, following the instructions in "Organizing with Smart Folders" in Mac Help, I get a new folder with nothing in it. No results at all. Plus, what I'm looking for is only about 3 mouse clicks in Windows Explorer, to add a "Dimensions" column to the window for any folder I'm looking at, populating it with the dimensions of any photos in the folder.

I've come to the conclusion that Finder is sadly lacking in capabilities, compared to Windows Explorer. So my next question is, what other programs are out there that are more advanced than Finder, that will allow me to add columns for dimensions, date picture taken, bit rate of MP3 files, etc. and be able to sort by those columns? I'm not looking for scripts or elaborate custom searches or image management or photo editing software. I just want to be able to view any folder and add the appropriate columns and then click on column headings to sort by those fields of data.

As elegant and advanced as Mac OS X is, this appears to be a glaring oversight and very much out of character from the rest of what seems to be a well-designed and user friendly operating system.

Surely, I'm not the only one with these needs. What have others used to accomplished these very simple tasks?

 

[nikcmac]

*solution...

I know no one has posted on this in a while, but in Finder in 10.5.4 there STILL isnt a GOOD way to do this! The closest I've found is to do a smart search and save it. What you do is you search in Finder (top corner of finder window magnifying glass-style search) and hit the plus symbol to add a parameter to the search...click where it says "Kind"(by default AFAIK) and change it to "Other..." and find and add "Resolution Height" and/or width and then say "is less than" and type the resolution height that you want (400 in my case because I want to find pictures too small to use as wallpapers) The reason this does not work well is evidently because the "Resolution Height" and "Dimensions" are different attributes according to Finder. This means the "Resolution Height/Width" have to be independently input by a application or the creator, they are not simply deduced from the dimensions. This leads to almost every file showing up when you search for "is less than" because they pretty much all have a "Resolution Height" of "0" even though they obviously have dimensions 1234x1234, etc.

I've found a solution :/ ...use FileBrowse...not free, but there's a free 30 day trial. It's really weird to use but once you find the folder you want to sift through you can organize by dimensions, which I assume essentially organizes by either smallest dimension or smallest combined dimensions(megapixels?). This program actually shows a line of thumbnails with the dimensions below each thumbnail and a preview of the picture below...at least it works...try it out.

 

[AbstractMonkeys]

Another solution

After endless frustration with Finder, I purchased PathFinder from Cocoatech, and it's been great. I don't know how anyone manages files on a Mac without it.

There are various options for choosing columns and sorting based on file info, and the thumbnail views are actually big enough to see. It's the closest functionality to Windows Explorer I've found for the Mac.

--J

 

[troyhark]

I've come to the conclusion that Finder is sadly lacking in capabilities, compared to Windows Explorer.
As elegant and advanced as Mac OS X is, this appears to be a glaring oversight and very much out of character from the rest of what seems to be a well-designed and user friendly operating system.

Surely, I'm not the only one with these needs. What have others used to accomplished these very simple tasks?

I use a PC to sort files on the Mac! Much easier.
I hate, hate, hate Finder as it completely cripples my workflow, with its clumsiness and simplistic abilities/interface. I find its very presence baffling, especially when compared to the elegence elsewhere in OSX.
Default Folder X makes it better in places, though there is Leap, Mac Explorer, Forklift and as mentioned above there is Pathfinder. Mac Explorer, as you can guess by the name has some similarity to Windows Explorere http://www.ragesw.com/products/explorer.html

I use Directory Opus on the PC instead of Explorer, which makes Explorer seem underpowered, so Finder is even more painful to use, considering Finder is so weedy compared to Explorer. A real shame DOpus is not available for the Mac as it's my favourite bit of software after the PS/Bridge/LR triumvirate.

 

[myrhillion]

solved a similar problem, thought I'd share

I didn't really see an answer that I liked, and did get some clues from this forum thread.

I wanted to find all the images in my downloads that actually match my display resolution. I'm using Mavericks, which is much newer than most of this thread.

Turns out finder, can do what I need now.

Finder, New Smart Folder, Click + next to Save button, and select other just below and left now where it starts with "Kind" .

The dropdown now includes "Pixel Width" and "Pixel Height" as options.
I added each indepdently to get the files I wanted filtered. Now I can tag or move them all to a folder I'll use for wallpapers on my imac.

Hope this helps somebody else!