Keyword searching with OR operator

Question

If I have two keywords, say, “Bob” and “Mary” I know how to search for all photos containing BOTH keywords. Is there a way to search for all photos containing one OR the other (or both)?

JohanElzenga · Accepted Answer

There are several ways to do this. In the library filter you can click on one keyword, and then Ctrl-click / Cmd-click on the other keyword, so both are selected in the same column. Another (even easier) way is filter on Text, choose ‘Keywords’ and then ‘Contain’ or ‘Contain words’ (not ‘contain all’) and then fill in keyword1 keyword2. Of course you can also use a smart collection with two keywords and ‘Any’.

johnrellis · Answer

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Building on Johan’s reply, the first approach of using the Keyword column in the Metadata browser is fussy and clumsy when you’ve got a large number of keywords, since the scroll bar and fonts are tiny and you can’t use auto completion to quickly find the desired keywords.

The second approach, using the “Keywords contains words” criterion in filters or smart collections can mismatch keywords when they contain spaces, and there’s no auto completion, so it’s easy to trip over misspellings and typos.

As a third approach, the Any Tag plugin’s Filter By Keyword command lets you populate the Metadata browser’s Keyword columns using auto completion of keywords, letting you choose “Match all” or “Match any”:

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