Duplicate words in Smart Collection doesn't work

Question

When creating a smart collection, if you tell it to find all searchable text containing all, and then you put duplicate words, it does not work. For example, I am an avid birder, and I sort all the bird photographs by their scientific names. One of the birds name is "pica pica" which I note in one of the metadata fields. Lightroom pulls in every photo with the single word pica no matter how I enter it (with or without quotes, with or without plus signs). It does not search for text containing pica space pica. Can this be fixed?

johnrellis · Accepted Answer

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

"An even better idea would be for Adobe to fix this - maybe if enough of us point it out, they will do something?"

Building on Johan's reply, the root cause is a very poor design of LR's text matching operators, not a bug in the implementation of that design.

LR is behaving here exactly as designed. The criterion:

<field> contains words x y z

matches a photo if the field contains the space-separated word x, the word y, and the word z. So when you write:

keywords contains words pica pica

that will match any photo containing "pica", since the photo contains the first instance of "pica" and it also contains the second instance of "pica".

The fundamental problem is that, unbelievably, there is no way to match the entirety of the most commonly used fields (exact match) or a substring of those fields, including spaces. What were they thinking?

From LR 7 through LR 13.2, you could use this idiom to get very nearly (but not quite) exact match:

match all
    <field> starts with pica pica
    <field> ends with pica pic

But that broke in LR 13.3 and Adobe hasn't prioritized a fix:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-starts-with-text-filter-on-captions-or-filename-incorrectly-matches-words/idi-p/14729614

There are many posts in the Ideas section of this forum that bring up use cases where exact match would have been very useful. I sincerely doubt that Adobe will ever address these by adding an exact-match operator for the most commonly used fields, given they haven't fixed years-long outstanding bugs in smart collections and filtering:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/smart-collection-starts-with.52800/post-1352812

johnrellis · Answer

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]  There's only one way to do exact keyword match with the built-in features of LR. Go to the Keyword List panel in the left column of Library.  In the Filter Keywords box,  type "pica":  Hover the mouse over the desired keyword (e.g. "Pica pica") and then click the secret right arrow that magically appears. That opens the Library Filter bar's Metadata browser, with that keyword selected.   Though you don't have the full power of smart collections, you can add additional criteria using the Filter bar and then save them as a filter preset. The Keyword List panel and the Metadata browser are quite fussy to work with, especially with large hierarchical keyword lists or if you want to search for multiple keywords at once. An easier way to get an exact match with the Metadata browser is to use the Any Tag plugin's Filter By Keyword command (which I've assigned to Ctrl K): Alternatively, use the Any Filter plugin, which provides an exact match operator for every text field (880 fields in all).

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