P: Lightroom Add support for Boolean Search

Negative boolean operators would be useful for me for all the reasons Steffen and Armen have already laid out

Implementation like macOS does it with "Smart Folders" or Apple Photos "Smart Albums" would be a game changer - really!


Waiting for it.

This is really a missing feature!

ps: "not in any album" is a must have, thank you for that. But it's hidden somehow for some users

Or just implement like Apple Photos do it nowadays with "macOS Photos Smart Albums". Very smart! With this you will cover quite all

Searching for two keywords results in an 'AND' operation, but searching for two People is an 'OR' operation. This seems inconsistent.

More importantly, there seems to be no way to search for photos containing "Both Andrew and Emily" (set intersection), nor any way to search for photos containing "Andrew but not Emily" (set subtraction).

In general, why not implement all the Boolean operation and brackets in the filters: AND,OR,XOR, ...
This would be the most precise way to search!
And this does not need to complicate the search function, just make LR understand this language. Google does it great, eBay, ...

Hi,
pretty much the same flow as Armen described above for exports of all sorts. And some more:
- When tagging my pictures, I sometimes get distracted. Would be helpful to filter only those where no tag is assigned yet
- Face recognition: I still tag people on my pictures as long as face recognition is not 100% reliable. So I select all pics where person Steffen is present and tag them with "steffen". Then I like to see all pics where Steffen is not present (or tag "steffen" is not assigned) to review and tag the missed ones.
Steffen

Hi Armen

Thanks for the insights. It helps us understand the workflows better which are crucial in designing the features. In the meantime, the only option I can think of is using flags/ratings in some permutation (unless they are already being used in some other capacity).

Can you elaborate on why the "Not in any album" seem strange? This was a highly requested (link here). My take on the most common usage is that people want to assign the photos to atleast one album. This filter will help them find such orphan photos easily and assign them to the relevant albums. Is there something additional you would like this feature to handle?

-Ankur

Hi Ankur!

It's a logical way to track photos that were submitted to stock sites. I currently tag these photos with "Stock" keyword when culling or have time to dive into old photos of mine. Later, when I'm at a computer and plan to submit a pack of new photos I search for the keyword and export them. Having an ability to search for "not" gives two advantages. I can filter out photos that already have "Stock" keyword applied to them, so I only look at photos that are not yet 'reviewed'. Second, by having a "Submitted" tag I can filter out photos that were not yet submitted. The same logic applies when submitting to Instagram and other sites. Simply put, you can quickly browse only unpublished photos.

Another, much more personal use case, we use AppleTV as our main media device at home, and it's quite convenient when you make your screensaver to use Lightroom album, that LR automatically generates when you export photos to iOS photos. The problem is tracking photos that you already have exported. So Again, the easiest way currently is tagging (or having them in an Album, it does not matter) "AppleTV", that way I know which photos are on the screensaver, but this information is not as important, as knowing which photos are still not there. So searching for "Not AppleTV" or similar would list all photos that are not tagged, and you choose new photos to export by tagging or adding them to the album.

In a perfect world these modular searches could be saved as smart albums, in reality they would be just saved search tags. So when you click on them, you get the results.



If there are better ways to manage those kinds of situations with current tools, I'm all ears 🙂

P.S. 
The latest feature "Not in (any) Album" is a very strange implementation, to be honest 🙂 I highly doubt that that many people have ALL of their photos assigned to an album or strive to it. 

Hi Armen, Steffan, Antoine

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would like to further understand what kind of workflow you are looking at where this feature will be useful? More specifically, what would you like to do with photos that don't contain the tag "spring", NOT shot on "iPhone", NOT having a certain person, etc.?

~Ankur