I found what strongly seems like a bug in Gwenview. But I’m new to Linux and need the community’s confirmation that it’s a bug before reporting it to bugs.kde.
I have my images sorted in Dolphin by the time of when it was changed/created. And in Dolphin it’s sorted correctly. However, opening them with Gwenview always misplaces certain images (in Gwenview).
Investigating the issue I found that the affected images come with attached EXIF and XMP metadata, which lists a different time of change/creation than in the system and Gwenview apparently uses those extra metadata entries instead of the system ones.
This behaviour to me is unexpected and unwanted, because the system (Dolphin) sorts the files by the system change/creation date and that’s the correct behaviour.
To reproduce the issue, you can download for example any of the artworks of Young Il Choi from their Artstation account, for example https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qnqQn
They come with EXIF and XMP and show up differently than expected in Gwenview.
I need the community’s approval on reporting it as a bug or an explanation of why it’s not.
Thank you.
hi, welcome.
you can sort files in dolphin using 3 different date codes (modified, created, accessed), but i don’t know that you can sort images in gwenview with such things, there only seems to be one date option.
there is also in dolphin a code for date photographed that may be the sort method you need to better match what’s in gwenview.
in the extreme, you can modify the metadata to conform to one of more accessible date codes.
I have the images sorted out by “modified” date. Gwenview does correctly read this folder setting of Dolphin and sorts images accordingly. There is no need for extra manual sorting in Gwenview and that’s how it should be (unless you desire a different sorting in Gwenview which is an entirely different topic). I certainly can remove metadata from the “incorrect” images. However this is not a desired solution, nor this option is available to every user. The expected behaviour of Gwenview is to follow precisely the same sorting as the folder in Dolphin, and that’s what it sets to do. Except this certain case which is apparently caused by Gwenview prioritizing metadata timestamps over the system timestamps. Which contradicts the correct behaviour of Dolphin that conforms to ergonomy and user experience.
If no one explains to me that it’s not a bug, I’m reporting it.
Is this the issue you are experiencing? 242332 – Sort by file's Date Modified time (do not mix mtime and EXIF time)
oh, i see you think the sorting in dolphin is somehow transmitted to gwenview as if qwenview is just another view of the files selected.
i don’t think this is the case since qwenview has it’s own sorting options, and because the files you are actually looking at in qwenview are copies of the files from dolphin, not the actual files.
qwenview makes a temp file of everything you open with it leaving the original file untouched in case you need to revert any of the changes you make in qwenview.
i discovered this inconvenience early on using qwenview when trying to sort thru selections of images and culling the ones i didn’t want to keep by choosing delete… the files themselves were not actually deleted, only the working copies were removed from my instance of gwenview.
i’ve since moved on to other applications for this use case.
Seems so, a tad from a different spin, I personally don’t care about preserving EXIF sorting as an option. Thank you. I’ve created a bug report anyway, it’s many years old and would be nice if the developers were to fix it.
That the image viewer should pick up the file manager’s sorting for a certain folder is a natural assumption coming from Windows, and it’s also the very basic of user experience and ergonomy. Unfortunately I discovered that on Linux such a thing is not common sense, hence I sticked with Gwenview as it at least matches my expectation with opening folders sorted by date (except this particular case).
Which image viewer do you use, skyfish?
Can you recommend another image viewer which would actually keep the sorting as in Dolphin or, at least, like Gwenview but without the EXIF issue?
To be fair, it is actually transmitted to Gwenview from Dolphin. Because if in Dolphin it’s sorted by date, so is in Gwenview.
i didn’t test the sorting as i was only working with selections of images from withing a folder, but i found that pretty much every other image viewer works as i was expecting in terms of operating directly on the files selected.
so basically anything but qwenview 
i ended up with gthumb and nomacs at the top of my list for features that i wanted, and i would suggest checking them out… tho i did just check both for the order of the thumbnails when opening a folder, and how dolphin has the files sorted has no effect on the order of the thumbnails, they just open in file name order.