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Inspiring
August 10, 2021
Open for Voting

P: Please add case sensitive text search

  • August 10, 2021
  • 8 replies
  • 454 views

I am using the current LrC 10.3 on Win10.  There seems to be no way to use the text search and make it case sensitive.  For example, if I want to search for BIG I don't want to get big, Big, biG, etc.  I just want BIG.

 

For years I have wanted a case sensitive search in Lightroom.  Here is a very quick and dirty mockup where I added the Ignore case option on the left side for text searches:

 

If you want case insensitive searches (what you get now) then check the option.  Adobe could even make it already checked by default:

 

I think this is a trivial thing for Adobe to do when they do their SQL queries on the catalog.  It is really surprising that they seem to not already have it since in almost all programs that do any text searching it is a standard option.

8 replies

shikamu
Known Participant
February 21, 2024

It has been a few years, but this simple, easy to implement feature has still not been added. LrC 13.2 came out today and not in it either. 😞

shikamu
Known Participant
October 26, 2021

After reading the new stuff in LrC 11 it appears that this small, very useful feature was not added. 😞

johnrellis
Legend
August 17, 2021

The "Updating catalog" message is a confusing message displayed by LR when you first run a plugin that adds a custom metadata field to the catalog.  It's harmless and won't corrupt your catalog -- it's unfortunate that LR displays it.

As for Any Filter, use the "matches" operator to do case-sensitive matching, e.g.

 

See here for documentation on the "matches" operator:

https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anyfilter.htm#textops 

Inspiring
August 17, 2021

Thank you, but I have already tried that plugin.  Actually, I tried these 2 plugins:

https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anyfilter.htm

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/extended-search

The Extended Search plugin took 10+ minutes to do what LrC could do in less than 1 second.  I ran it several times and each time I got a very concerning message that it was updating my catalog.  Fortunately, I backup my catalog every day and I had not done anything since the previous day's backup so I just went back to that catalog.  I didn't trust the catalog that the plugin had updated multiple times.  In addition, every time I used the plugin it wiped out my Metadata panel columns and replaced them with one the plugin created.  After using it I had to reset the columns to my preferred choices.

I then installed the Any Filter plugin and it allows many kinds of searching, but I couldn't find any way to do case sensitive searching on text.  I will investigate the info you provided.

johnrellis
Legend
August 16, 2021

As a workaround waiting for Adobe to implement this, use the Any Filter plugin, specifically its "matches" operator, which does case sensitive matching.

Inspiring
August 11, 2021

Thanks for the tip about the vote.  I would appreciate it if you would also vote yes. 🙂

Inspiring
August 10, 2021

@Victoria_Bampton_Lightroom_Queen

Thank you for your reply.  By the way, I have occasionally read articles on your great website.  Thanks for that too!

Victoria Bampton LR Queen
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 10, 2021

Thanks for the idea. The forum does not automatically apply a "vote" to your post so don't forget to click the green arrow in the upper left.

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen