While dealing with the time date sorting problem, my thought was to run the slideshow to get all the last access time stamps to about 2 seconds apart using the slide show. The problem is slide show is *ONLY* full screen and I can't find any way to switch to another desktop and let it run in the background as it goes through large directories (tried many times, but all other programs don't run full screen so no other selections exist). Sadly the full screen method pretty much locks up the computer for a very long time and isn't really feasible to use unless you do it over night.

The only way I see of fixing this is getting back the capability of running the slide show in the current window so you can switch to other tasks.

I am not sure why this function wasn't included in the current versions. it would be a great improvement.

maybe you should inform this on kde bug tracker too

Never knew why it was taken out, but since the original post in 2012, you still can't do the slide show in the windowed mode. Also, the sorting routine from kde4 to kde5 increased near exponentially. Instead of having to wait 20-30mins for 10000 images to sort it takes what seems like less than a minute now.

Also, no one bothered to reply on this post for a few years, so I never really figured they could/would actually do it. Unfortunately, I am not good at coding things so I can't even propose a patch to bring this feature back.