Hi,
I have been using Lightroom since the first version as it was my preferred software for a majority of my workflow for the better part of a decade (not sure how long its actually been at this point since the original LR) Whether it was importing, key wording, cataloging and basic batch editing I was always able to get most of my work organized into a convenient DAM system that also aloud me to prep photos for finalizing in photoshop in a much more efficient fashion. I loved LR and was its biggest advocate for the longest time, but now I have an issue I cannot explain and I was hoping that somebody here may be able to help me out with this.
Since a little bit of background on my DAM system seems relevant... I keep separate catalogs for specific trips,weeks or months where I plan to shoot a lot, then also for the current year (when this problem originally occurred it was 2016) and then I have my Archive catalog which at the end of each year I import that years catalog into it. The Archive cat has now got all my work from 2007 - 2017 which is something like 350,000 images and its because of the amount of photos in that catalog that I find it a necessity to make smaller working catalogs so that (i.e 2016 cat) I can actually work on the images without LR basically crashing. I have never really heard any confirmation what the absolute limit is for catalogs in LR but once it gets to around 150,000 images performance diminishes greatly and I am running a 6 core mac pro with SSD everything running Thunderbolt II and 32Gb RAM so its not the computer or its peripherals slowing things down.
Sooooo last October I had shot probably 1200 images one morning as the waves were incredible and a lot of those images made up sequences. I was testing the Canon 200-400mm f/4L through Canons professional service program so I was trying to really shoot as much as I could so I could compare the files through the ever changing lighting situations at dawn on the ocean. I imported these files later and and while I was working on them my sequences were out of order which was odd so I naturally went to sort them by Capture time and to no avail. It has basically been ever since then that my sort by Capture Time stopped working appropriately. Its weird because even though the files are not ordered by the appropriate capture time the files metadata still reads their original capture date in the files as it should but it does not correlate with the sorting order. I have searched the internet to see if anyone else has had this issue but have been unsuccessful and I keep thinking its got to be something stupid/simple but I am all out of ideas so hopefully somebody has an idea that might be able to relieve me of this major annoyance. A lot of my work contains sequences so when your working on images and they are always out of order it really does hinder my performance when rating images and picking the best shot of the sequences. After this happened in my small catalog which I think was only a months worth of images, the problem started showing up in the rest of my catalogs without me ever merging the smaller catalogs into the archives. One thing to note is that I was also using a CPS loaned canon 5dsr at the time and am skeptical that perhaps some sort of setting in that camera itself is what triggered this chain reaction? Or maybe it is somehow the LRMobile app that is the culprit? I am really at a loss here and its pretty much pushing me towards having to migrate my entire archive of 350K to Capture One which I am not in the least bit excited about nor do I know if Capture One will handle a large catalog any better...
If anybody has had this mis-sorting issue in LR or has any ideas as to why this has happened to all of my catalogs please help!
In this screenshot you can see that the sequence is out of order