MacOS – Is Lion’s new “Date Added” field supposed to work in the Trash

findermacostrash

One of the little things in Lion I was most excited about was the Finder's new "Date Added" field. I wanted it for two folders in particular, for obvious reasons: the Downloads folder and the Trash.

Well, it works in Downloads, but as far as I can tell, not so much in the Trash. Now, when I first booted into Lion, Date Added didn't work anywhere. I suspected that it was because Spotlight wasn't done reindexing yet. Now that it's finished, Date Added is populated on new downloads, but still not in new Trash items.

Looks like it simply doesn't work. But maybe Spotlight is not the only thing involved. Am I missing something? Or am I doomed to futilely hoping they incorporate this in a point update?

Best Answer

The answer was basically in my original question. Spotlight is indeed the sole arbiter of the Date Added column. And the Trash, not being a real folder, is not Spotlight indexed.

If you move a file with a Date Added into the Trash, it keeps the Date Added from its original folder. If you then put it back, its Date Added (to the original folder) is updated to the present.

It would probably take a significant engineering effort to make this work for the Trash, so I'm not expecting to see this fixed before Mountain Lion, if ever.

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MacOS – Sort trash files by date trashed

Update for OSX 10.9 Mavericks:

It appears that you can now sort by Date Added in OSX Mavericks. In Trash right click one of the columns and click to check the Date Added column. The click on the column header until the list of files is sorted by Date Added descending.

For OS X 10.7 Lion:

Go to the AppleScript Editor, paste in the following script and save it in /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
    repeat with this_item in added_items
        do shell script "find " & quoted form of POSIX path of this_item & " -exec touch {} \\;"
    end repeat
end adding folder items to

Then…

Right-click on any folder in Finder, go to Services and click Folder Actions Setup.
Cancel the dialog asking which script to attach.
Click the checkbox to Enable Folder Actions
Click the plus sign to choose the Trash.

Press ⌘ cmd + ⇧ shift + G and type in ~/.Trash, click Go or press ↩ return, and then click Open.
On the right side, click the plus sign to choose the AppleScript that you saved earlier.

Thanks to Graham for the link which pointed me in the right direction.

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Select all songs hold ⌥ and press ⌫. Confirm and they are gone.

Best Answer

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