Lightroom sorting problem and question.

[Redcrown]

I'm a Bridge+ACR user and rarely use Lightroom, so please excuse ignorance. In Lightroom, I'm trying to sort a large number of images by "Edit Time", so I can find the images I most recently processed. The images are Tifs and jpegs only, stored in many folders under a root folder. Raw files are stored in a different root folder structure.

I've imported all images and pointed Lightroom at the root folder. I select sort: Edit Time and "Z to A" sort direction. What I get is not what I want. Images at top of the display are not the most recent edited. There are 36,000 images under the root folder. I've discovered that the first 268 images displayed are not the most recent, but images displayed after that appear to be in the correct sequence.

The 268 "out-of-place" images at the top appear to be in random order. They are from many folders, and I can't see anything unique about them that might confuse Lightroom. In the metadata there are "Date Time Original", "Date Time Digitized", and just "Date Time". The simple "Date Time" field is clearly the date and time the image was last saved (processed) by Photoshop.

So what is Lightroom using for "Edit Time" in the sort?

[digitaldog]

One suggestion is to do this kind of work with Smart Collections.
For example:

[Jeffrey Saldinger]

I use a series of the kind of smart collection that Andrew has suggested.

[fdisilvestro]

Lightroom uses a field called "touch time", which is not part of the metadata and is not readily accessible (you need to use a Database manager to open the catalogue) to sort by "Edit time"

Any time you do anything to an image in LR, any edit, apply a preset, a keyword, rating, etc. it will update that value.

If you have not done absolutely anything to the images, then it seems to default to whatever date is available in the order "Edit time", "Capture time" (but this is my empirical observation).

The "Touch time" is saved as a Unix timestamp, so you need to convert it to a human readable date to check it.

[Redcrown]

Thanks, especially to fdiosilvestro. Turns out I can't do what I want in LR since LR ignores the dates in the file metadata and uses that strange catalog "touch time" instead. The tifs and jpegs in my folder trees were created by Photoshop, and never modified by LR.

I can do it in Bridge, but it takes forever. Point Bridge at a root folder containing over 30K images, and "show items from subfolders", and sort by Date Modified, and then watch a Netflix special while you wait.

[headmj]

Go to library.  Select the appropriate catalogue.  Select Grid View from the menu on the bottom.  At the nd of the the selections there you will see a sorting pull down.  Select capture time.  Your photos will appear in the grid in capture time order.  You can then select loupe view and see your photos in capture time order. 

As you found out, in windows explorer you can add a date taken column and sort on i.