Sometimes I hate Microsoft!. Even if I gave up playing The Sims tomorrow, I'd still be stuck with Windows and the new "features" that Microsoft loves to add. "Features" that generally stop me doing things I've been doing for years. I use The Sims storytelling feature to try to keep tabs on what my Sims are doing. Until about a year ago both Windows Explorer and the Windows "Photos" application would display pictures in order of Date Modified. Then they changed "Photos"to use a new "Date Taken" field, a field which is (as far as I know) only filled if the picture was taken with a camera (including the camera inside a smartphone). The Sims 2 storytelling feature doesn't fill the "Date Taken" field, and, in the absence of a value in this field, Windows "Photos" uses the "Date Created" field. But the "Date Created" field shows the date the file was placed in its current folder, so if the picture was copied from another location then "Date Created" will only show the date the file was copied. To get the original date of the picture you need the "Date Modified" field -- the one that Windows Photos no longer uses. GRRRR! Now in February of this year I restored all the Veronaville Storytelling files from a backup, which took the form of a .zip file. This meant that then "Date Created" field for all the files was set to the current date. If I had extracted the storytelling files from the zip file using Windows Explorer, then it would have reset the "Date Modified" fields to the current date too, but fortunately I had the good sense to use 7-zip, which allowed my picture files to retain their proper datestamps in the "Date Modified" field. This made the "Photos" application useless to me for all but the newest storytelling files.

But at least Windows Explorer was showing storytelling pictures in their proper order -- UNTIL TODAY! Now Microsoft appear to have broken that for me too! Without a filter it still shows picture files correctly, but when I tried to filter it so I could only see the pictures for one household, I got this:
They're all showing a Date Modified 18:09 on the 2nd of February, which is of course the time I restored from back up. And, while I'm at it, why have the JPEG files got no sizes? JPEG files do have a size -- they can actually be quite big!

I checked by looking at the same folder with the same filter in a command prompt window:
It shows the dates and sizes correctly. So they are there, it's just that Windows Explorer isn't showing them or sorting by them. And of course I can't see the pictures inside a command prompt window.

I don't know what I should do. I can see the pictures properly, and in the right order inside the game's Storytelling feature, but the pictures -- especially the thumbnails -- are very small there. I like to be able to view the pictures outside the game, where I can enlarge them a little, to help me to see what was going on. I think someone recently mentioned an alternative to Windows Explorer in a post in one of the threads here. (In which case maybe I should have asked in WCIF instead of here) but there may be other solutions or workarounds. And while I'm at it, an alternative picture file viewer to "Photos" could be useful too. If I do need to get new software, I obviously would prefer something free, or at least cheap. (I am a Scotsman after all! )

Windows Explorer's search function is awful, and shouldn't be relied upon under any circumstances. Why not name the images according to the order you want them to appear in, and then sort by name?

If you save to a backup drive, the "date changed" date changes to the date you copied it over.

I think there's a date filter called something like "original date" or "date created" (going off what I'd imagine the translated version is). The original date should still be stored in the files.

You'll have to manually add the filter (Right-click in the filter line, choose "more...")

That really isn't true, or at least not always true. I have character files in my neighborhood that have a last modified date of 2004, and that date predates my current computer by like 15 years.

Here are the dates on one of these files:



You can see that the Created date got updated when I set up my latest computer and copied over all of my Sims files in 2020, but the last modified date was not changed from 2004.

You just need to change the sort order in the window.

I did not know that you could do that. Thanks!

Glad to help! Getting it to stick, and getting it to work across all folders is a mystery though...

in the View option there is no possibilty to tick this anymore? Sort order (and column visibility) was under the RClick IIRC.
Neither in the 'Edit/Options->set view as default?' exists?

There is some regedit magic for this for sure (until next brilliant update ofc) in the Explorer branch. I am not in the mood to spin VM with Windows (vacation, damn!) so I won't check in a few days.

There's this:

I find though that the folder type can vary according to the context in which you view a folder, so things get undone often.
There's a whole bunch of stuff in group policy and of course the registry about this, but for the average user, Windows made things a bit muddled with the settings interface pasted over the old control panel.

With Windows' default copy handler, copying files will set 'created' to the current datetime, while moving will preserve the existing one. I think there's also some different behaviour regarding moving files across different partitions, a bit fuzzy on the details. However, a lot of non-default copy handlers can preserve the created date.

I think perhaps I was thinking of the "created" date above, or just the "date". I have moved some really old files forth and back between my computers, and the "date changed" is usually kept as the original date (this one does change if you actually make changes to the file after it's moved, but as long as you don't make changes it seems to keep the date it had), but that sorting method often doesn't show, and needs to be added manually (which is annoying, because it's the one I use 99% of the time when I want to sort by date).

The "Date created" seems to change to whichever date the file was added, at least when moving from a harddrive (all the files I'd moved over had changed this date, with one random example set of files that had this date set 4 years later than the "Date changed" date).

The simple "Date" option seems to be more in line with the date actually created, although it's not entirely to be trusted.

I find this handling to be really messy, and don't really have a full overview of which dates are sorted how. Used to be a lot better on the previous Windows versions...

If you're moving a file that's on the same hard drive and partition, the file doesn't actually get moved. Instead, the OS just reroutes the file table so that the new filename points at the existing file, but its actual location on the disk doesn't change. If you're moving across disks or partitions, it obviously can't do that, so the file actually has to be moved. In theory, you wouldn't want these to have different effects on the file dates, since this is an implementation detail and not something the user should need to be aware of, but it wouldn't surprise me if Windows was inconsistent like that.