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Sean Phillips
Sean Phillips
Known Participant
April 4, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Add "Is Empty" and "Isn't Empty" to all attribute filters and Smart Collection filters

  • April 4, 2011
  • 53 replies
  • 1623 views

Lightroom desperately needs additional filtering (and smart filtering) capabilities. Specifically I want to be able to find all images for which I haven't entered anything in certain metadata fields. It is important to ensure that every image has certain metadata fields completed before releasing those images into the wild, but it's not always easy to find those empty fields....

Only some fields in the Attribute filter or in Smart Collections currently have an available option to filter by "Is Empty" or "Isn't Empty". For example, I can search for Is or Isn't Empty in the "Caption" field, but not in the "Title" field.

    53 replies

    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    February 10, 2018
    Just came along with the same question. As I was reading the coments I got an idea for a nice easy work around.

    In my metadata preset in the Lightroom Import dialog I write in the field title "no_title", in the field City "no_city" and so on...

    Voila, now i can working with smart collection, searching for the "no_title"

    Now, I just have to improve my english...sorry for it
    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    October 18, 2017
    Lightroom Classic 7.0 now provides "is empty" and "isn't empty" for Title.

    Unfortunately, many other fields still don't have "is empty": Country, State/Province, City, Sublocation, Creator, Job. 
    Sean Phillips
    Sean PhillipsAuthor
    Known Participant
    June 18, 2017
    Agreed. I use AnyFilter all the time. Adobe obviously don't care to add this kind of basic functionality to the software so we're going to have to keep using workarounds...
    Sean Phillips
    Sean PhillipsAuthor
    Known Participant
    June 18, 2017
    Agreed. I use AnyFilter all the time. Adobe obviously don't care to add this kind of basic functionality to the software so we're going to have to keep using workarounds...
    alanterra
    alanterra
    Inspiring
    June 18, 2017
    To remind people (I just posted this in response to another metadata search request), there are two plugins that will solve most of your search problems: Any Filter and Data Explorer. Any Filter allows you to build saved searches, but is a little more baroque in its user interface. Data Explorer needs to be set up for each search, but is really useful when you want to explore a field's values (e.g., when you aren't sure what you are looking for). I use Data Explorer more, but both are useful.

    And purchasing either is better than the seemingly pointless waiting for Adobe to make major changes in the search capabilities of Lightroom.
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    June 17, 2017


    so we can tell if there are any empty titles.
    M
    Marc Sinykin
    Participant
    January 15, 2017
    How do you do this? Are you talking about writing a plugin?
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    January 15, 2017
    The code is already there for some other parameters - just copy & paste it in for the rest!!
    C
    ColinMcD
    Inspiring
    January 13, 2017
    I've also bought that plug-in too (I checked, almost 5 years ago!)

    But I didn't use it often enough to familiarise myself with it, so I've not used it much. Need to try a tutorial and see if I can get back into it
    C
    ColinMcD
    Inspiring
    January 13, 2017
    I've also bought that plug-in too (I checked, almost 5 years ago!)

    But I didn't use it often enough to familiarise myself with it, so I've not used it much. Need to try a tutorial and see if I can get back into it
    Show more replies
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