bobpeers -> blog

This isn’t something I would normally think about since I know you can only sort folders by name, date or any other property available. However a friend had a problem with her computer and asked me to take a look. The problem was that she wanted to reorganise a folder of holiday photos in an arbitrary order chosen by her, basically drag and drop to reorder the items.

I slowly explained that it basically wasn’t possible except for some horrible hack of renaming the files to force them into alphabetical order to match her wishes or altering the dates on the images.

It was then that I realised that I couldn’t think of a good reason why this can’t be done. I’m happy with the way my folders are sorted but only because I’ve grown accustomed to the way computers work. In real life we often reorder items in seemingly arbitrary fashion to suit our needs, for example placing papers on top of a pile so we don’t forget them, or laying a document on my keyboard so there’s no way I can miss it when I return from lunch.

Maybe we need more flexible sorting so I can have my most frequently viewed files in a folder appear at the top or just drag them around in any order I feel like.