Filters have character restrictions on text

Question

I want to address a bug in tekst search:

When using the filters in Lightroom classic (LRc) you can search on text in a restricted number of items like title, subtitle and more.

Then there is the choice (2) between contains, contains all and contains words, starts with, ends with, is empty, or is not empty.

However, LRc does ignore certain text characters, which also makes the choice between (2) a bit useless when looking for especially editing errors with blancs, and remarks.

The text characters ignored by LRc that I have recognised are ( ) and blancs.

Examples:

If you search for (M) (indicating male in my pictures of insects) it will search for m and M in the titles of subtitles. ( and ) are ignored

searching for ' (M)'; with an extra blanc, is ignored too

Also searching for 'end with (M)' will return all text that ends with an M, M), m, and m).

So in short, searching for specific text between brackets, or after a blanc is impossible.

It seems to be impossible to search on differences between things with or without blancs or brackets.

I consider this a programming bug, since there is no option or setting to personalise the search filters to specific or broader either!

johnrellis · Answer

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@louisd79464044: "So in short, searching for specific text between brackets, or after a blanc is impossible."

Text search in LR Classic has, by design, always had limited capabilities. For example, you can't search for exact matches or for strings containing blanks, and searches always ignore case. And there are many bugs in that limited design that Adobe has left unfixed for years -- I've long suspected that the LR team no longer has engineers who fully understand either the design or the implementation of LR's search.

In Adobe's terminology, a "bug" is when the program doesn't behave according to what the developers designed or intended. They never consider the lack of a capability a "bug". (You of course can use your own definition of "bug" -- I'm just warning you how Adobe defines it in this forum.)

But with LR's search features, it's often very hard or impossible to discern what the intended design is. When I first implemented my Any Filter plugin, I spent many hours reverse engineering the intended design, which was complicated by inconsistencies in behavior. For example, consider the inconsistent behavior of searching Caption and Title when those fields contain "(M)" or "M". I'm guessing that the behavior of Caption was intended by Adobe and the behavior of Title was not, but who knows:

johnrellis_0-1766362937037.png

My Any Filter plugin tries hard to be consistent and bug free, and it provides many more capabilities, such as exact match. To search for Titles containing "(M)", use this search criteria:

johnrellis_1-1766364308818.png

And be sure to check the option Avoid Lightroom Bugs, which tells Any Filter not to use LR's buggy search features under the covers. This will cause Any Filter to go a little slower, but you'll get correct answers.

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