Yeah :S

Yes. The easiest thing to do is just group by same extension, moving onto the next one alphabetically.

So .jpg’s would be separate from .jpeg’s, despite meaning the same thing.

While there are thousands of extensions, in practice most of the time you’ve got a dozen or less even in a “downloads” folder, so it’s not really a big deal to scroll to the gifs, jpgs, pngs separately if you are looking for all images.

Something like photos processed by darktable are a good example of why this isn’t always practical. You have your raw files and your sidecar files side by side. You could separate them in settings I suspect but that’s not the default and god forbid you ever lose one. If you are in the habit of putting JPEGs in the same place you really want to separate by extension.

I always group by project. The OS can handle different file types in a folder. I need to be able to archive a folder and have all of the files regardless of file types.