Make playlist sortable

It would come in handy to be able to sort the playlist by clicking on the columns. Clicking multiple times would switch between sorting ascending and descending.

How would I go about implementing this myself and creating a PR? Where do I start?

Shotcut is great!

We chose not to implement this because:

  1. The order of the playlist dictates the order that the entries are played, not just the order that they are displayed. It may not be obvious to people that they have changed the play order.
  2. We do not want to display the playlist entries in an order that is not the play order to ensure that people always get the result they expect
  3. Some of the headings do not make sense to sort by (like start)

We have implemented a context menu item to sort by name and date:


Does that meet your needs?

We welcome contributors. There are technical notes to support developers here:
https://shotcut.org/siteindex/

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Thank you @brian, that solves it for me!

Many thanks - this is a big help!

Hi Brian!

I’ve been using Shotcut for over a year now, and this sort feature is great, but I wish that I could sort by filetype as well… For example, put all .mp3’s together, all .png’s, etc. The files could then be prioritized based on the previous sort type (mp3’s could then be sorted by date/name if they were sorted that way before swapping to filetype). This would make sorting through larger playlists easier to handle.

Is that something that is being added in the future?

Thanks!

Can you give more description for this request? What is the use case to play the files in order of file type?

If you just want a way to find media by file type, I recommend to do that in your operating systems file manager which already has features for filtering by file type.

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I use Shotcut to create YouTube videos. Rather than create a new project each time I want to create a video, I have a project for a given topic that may be used for multiple videos. Usually, I throw a bunch of clips, songs, and images into my playlist to create fully fleshed out videos in the timeline. Those clips, songs, and images in the playlist will have filters applies to them so I can drag and drop them wherever I want to in my timeline with those same filters applied (say a .gif that I have resized and used the chroma key on).

Sometimes, a project file may contain up to a hundred items in it, all different file types and all sourced from different locations on my computer (music folder, picture folder…). In order to find a song that I have in my list, I would have to scroll through the playlist and find the right one (and if I don’t remember the name, I’d have to search through the entire thing trying to find the .mp3 files and bounce around looking for it). It would be nice to sort the playlist by type and then I can scan for the right item (with my predetermined filters) faster.

It sounds like you are using the playlist as a “bin” to keep your project media. I think this is OK in simple cases, but fundamentally, the playlist is for playing clips in a certain order and that is what the functionality is focused on. I do not want to add features to the playlist that confuse it’s purpose. Maybe someday someone will add a more advanced project management and binning feature with folders, searching and other features people would expect.

In the meantime, I recommend to create a folder for each project and keep the media for each project in its respective folder.

There is some good context here if you have not see this: Project Management

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Brian, this discussion has been very interesting to me, because I have never used the playlist to play clips in a certain order. I’ve always used the playlist as a “bin” from which to drag clips to the timeline when and where I want them to play.

What would be the use case for playing clips sequentially from the timeline? I’m guessing that one could not have any particular effects applied when doing this - ? (I’m still relatively new to Shotcut, so I apologize for my lack of understanding …)

Of course, you can use filters on playlist items. Think of playlist as a single track timeline that is a storyboard view instead of a timeline. But also, playlist is intended to be like a bin feature - at least for now. Rather, if you look at the Road Map, I have intended to add a tags feature that would also include filtering on tags in the playlist view. That filter system would also include some standard options such as Video, Audio, or Image. It could also include search (across file name and comment).

What I think will be very useful is the option to create folders (or bins) to order the media files, for example, have a folder with pictures, another with audio, and so on.

This is a common feature in most video editors

Hi! thanks for linking this here on the other topic, but i found it before but because i am new to Shotcut, i still didn’t managed where to click to acess exactly this context menu.