Windows Numbering???
 

Greetings ALl,
In the grand scheme of things, this question is more than a little trite but it still bothers me all the same. I was wondering if there was a way to alter it, fix it, etc.

Sometimes my computer orders things not to my liking. For example:
image1.jpg
image11.jpg
image12.jpg
image2.jpg
image21.jpg
image22.jpg
etc., etc., etc.

I just want my computer to order things like normal 1, 2, 3, etc. Is there a way to correct this or fix it? Just wondering and thanks

image01.jpg
image11.jpg
image12.jpg
image02.jpg
image21.jpg
image22.jpg
etc., etc., etc.


001 if you want to go into the hundreds.

Which version of windows are you using? That looks like win2k or earlier. The alphabetical sorting you described is the traditional display order of most systems. There's no natural distinction between the letters and numbers so it sees image12 as lower than (and before) image2. You want a hybrid alphabetic and numeric sort.

XP sorts numerically by default. i.e. a12 is bigger and after a2. It can be disabled with a policy setting or equivalent registry change, but the default is what you want.

The old alternative was to zero-pad leading digits. a2 becomes a02, and therefore sorts as it would numerically.

If you think that renaming your files would be useful, but don't want to do it manually, this utility might be of use to you:

http://www.fauland.com/af5.htm

cool. want to try that with a textfile list.

file names like:
1.mp3
2.mp3

textfile list:
1 - a song.mp3
2 - anudda song.mp3

Gee. I didn't know that.

Oldsters like me would just have expected alphanumeric sorting or some unicode equivalent. Maybe I should upgrade to the teletubby OS after all.

Ditto. I first learned about it entirely by accident. The sort order was correct, which was wrong! :)

In XP Pro, or at least the installs of it that I have used do not do that. Do you know where the setting for this is? Is there a registry bit that changes the behavior? Thanks!

Hate it when people make me do reality checks. :)

Windows XP Home SP2:
<img src="http://img275.imageshack.us/img275/6662/testsort7qc.jpg">

Windows 2000 SP4:
<img src="http://img275.imageshack.us/img275/3328/testsort20lz.jpg">

I remember it starting with XP. I think from the early days, but I don't have any old installs booted. It can be disabled with a registry change but I'd have to look it up. MS had an article on it under "numeric sort order" or similar. I'm sprinting out the door right now...

If you can find other contributing factors I'm all ears. Pro + phase of moon + beard color... A customer of mine complained about the "new" behavior not a month ago. He decided against making his system different from everyone else's, but there's no making everybody happy.

Thanks CSflim for the link to the renumbering program.
I'm finding it very useful for renaming music files that come with an info file.

The modern hybrid sort method is usually referred to as "XP numeric sort method"

This was useful when I was digging through game screenshots and they wouldn't load in the right order. I changed IrfanView over to the XP method and voila :)

foobar2000 has a fantastic renaming and tagging facility for multimedia files. You may want to try it out. It will delve into the files and find metadata (if the plugin supports that function) and rename the files based on the metadata.