How can I organise collections by date in Lightroom?

Question

I often go walking with my camera and I like to collect the photos from each walk into a collection. I name the collection after the place I've walked, and it ultimately contains any photos I took, plus anything I might have done with them in Photoshop. Sometimes the walks might span more than one day (or even weeks).

Is there any way for me to date the collections or organise the collections so that each walk is ordered by the date it started. In short I'd like to see a list of all the walks I've made with the most recent at the top and the oldest at the bottom.

Is there a better way for me to achieve the same thing?

The other problem is that if each collection is named after a walk and I complete the same walk twice, this means the name of the collection needs extra information (i.e. a date) to differentiate it. Again this necessity makes me sure I'm not organising things sensibly.

Answer 1

I checked in Lightroom CC 2015.1.1 and you can choose from two options for sorting:

1. Sort by name
2. Sort by Kind

It's on the Adobe help website as well (https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/photo-collections.html) which confirms that it sorted the name alphabetically. It doesn't say anything about by Kind but that also sorted within the same kind by name alphabetically.

So you can add a prefix to a collection name to sort by date, here are some examples:

• yyyy-mm-dd-WalkName e.g. 2015-10-04-SomePlaceName
• yyyymmdd-WalkName e.g. 20151004-SomePlaceName
• yyyy-mm-dd-7d-WalkName e.g. 2015-10-04-7d-SomePlaceName
• yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd WalkName e.g. 2015-10-02 to 2015-10-04 SomePlaceName

Putting the date in that order makes it sort chronologically as you want. One example has '7d' which could mean that the collection contains photos over 7 days, you could use other letters for longer periods. I tried adding the start and end date which works fine if you don't mind a longer name.

Extra details:

For those that don't know, a Lightroom catalog is actually an SQLite database. I was curious about how long you could make a collection name. I checked online and I couldn't find any evidence about limits. I checked the database and it had no limit set, I think it might be based on the Limits In SQLite. For a quick test I was able to create a collection name with 1000 character which is way more than any sensibly named collection would ever need :). This means you could put as much information into a collection name as you like.