Events folder flattens all photos even with a subfolder pattern

Observed behavior

Given this setup for my folder structures (gist: the folder immediately before the photos has a full date, this mainly helps with making sure file names are unique specially when the camera counter gets close to restarting; and also has all the information I require in one level of hierarchy, the rest above it is just extra)

I created an event for my holidays travel that span multiple days, instead of having the photos inside the Event folder be separated in their own days they were all added to the same day:

  • 2025
    • 05-30 Example event
      • 2025-05-30
        • all the photos from 05/30 to 06/15 (examples)

If these photos happened to span days where the camera counter had reset there would have been file naming conflicts.

Expected behavior

  • 2025
    • 05-30 Example event
      • 2025-05-30
        • photos from 05/30
      • 2025-05-31
        • photos from 05/31
      • … and so on for each day, just like in Individual Photos

Steps required to reproduce

  1. Set the folder structure like this:
  2. Select a bunch of photos spanning multiple days and add to an Event

Operating system/Hardware used

macOS 15.5
Macbook Pro M2 Max
Aspect 1.0.0-rc.19

The elements of the event folder structure path are all specific to the event as a whole, so this would require an additional organization logic/pattern on top that allows to specify a finer granularity.

The big question there would be where exactly that logic would apply:

  1. Only during import: This would have the least impact and conflict potential, but would result in folder names getting out of sync when adjusting image dates later on
  2. Continuously: While keeping things organized regardless of date/time changes, this could quickly run into issues with data files that don’t have a date associated, as well as with files that are supposed to be stored next to an image, but for some reason have a different date.

Aren’t these considerations the same for the individual photos? And #2 sounds like one of the goals of Aspect. Did I misunderstood your concerns?

I think my post should/could have been a feature request for the event organization to work just like individual photos but with the event folder as the parent folder.

Indeed, individual photo folders (at least the managed ones, as opposed to the scanned folders) have the same issue and this is definitely a strong point to consider.

The implementation details of this vs. the way “individual photos” folders are manages differ quite a bit, though, and some features may not interact very well by default. For example, using an export collection to automatically export some of the event photos to a “publish” sub folder within the event would generally conflict with a rule to organize images into sub folders by day.

Another consideration is the “Mark Folders As Events…” functionality, which allows to quickly switch between considering a sub folder of a scanned folder to either contain individual photos or to be an event folder. With rules that have sub-event granularity that could mean that accidentally selecting a folder as an event could unexpectedly mess up an existing folder hierarchy. But maybe this could be solved with a per-event option that defaults to “don’t organize within event” for events outside of the library.

My gut feeling is that such a feature should probably behave selectively (e.g. specific to a certain file type or ignoring exported photos) and it should probably allow to specify multiple organization rules/path templates. This would then lead to the next question of whether it would actually make sense to offer this for individual photo folders as well, for example to enable storing all RAW files in a “raw/” sub folder.

A final thought would be whether this should also be extended to file names, or whether that’s really only something to consider for imports.

(I’ve opened an internal ticket for this (#1563) to keep track of it and will move this to the “Feature Requests” category)