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jarnoa
Participant
October 5, 2020
Question

Library filter not finding virtual copies in stack

  • October 5, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 351 views

I have created virtual copies of six images from my hard drive. This was done using a keyword search and flagged status attribute search.

I have stacked them with their originals (1 to 1, 2 to 2, etc. nothing unusual)

When I click on 'Kind>Virtual Copies' in the Attributes bar it does not show the Virtual copies UNLESS they are unstacked.

Can it be changed so the search finds stacked images also?

Thanks,

Bill

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

J
jarnoaAuthor
Participant
October 6, 2020

Thanks to you all for your helpful responses.

DJ paige's response suits my need for this one as I was trying to show some students the advantages of Virtual Copies to make different edits. I was then stacking the copies with the original but was unable to bring them up by clicking the Virtual Copies icon.

His change in workflow solves my immediate problem.

I used Richard's suggestion to create a Smart Collection that looked for the text 'copy' which found them. Is that the best filter to use?

Once again, many thanks to you all.

Bill

 

R
Community Expert
richardplondonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 6, 2020

If making a Smart Collection, a text search on "Copy" will not reliably find every Virtual Copy since the Copy Name metadata is not necessarily always filled in with "Copy1", or 2 etc. That may have been edited to something different and more informative, also each Proofing Copy gets automatically named according to the output being soft-proofed for. It will also not reliably find only Virtual Copies - but, anything that happens to show the character string "C O P Y" incidentally, somewhere. Could be in a Caption, or in the folder name, or within a keyword.

 

What you can make use of (for filtering or for a VC), is that Master copies tend not to have any text showing in their Copy Name field. A Virtual Copy pretty much always does. Only if you have gone out of your way to fill text in for a Master, or remove auto-created naming from a VC, or if you have switched master and copy status between two image versions, will that method be unreliable.

 

For example, below are Smart Collection criteria selecting for images with the keyword "france", that (according to the above assumption) are probably virtual copies, and that also are rated two stars minimum:

 

R
Community Expert
richardplondonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 6, 2020

edit: I meant, "what you can make use of for filtering or for a SC (smart collection)"

R
Community Expert
richardplondonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 5, 2020

Collapsing stacks hides those images and removes them (temporarily) from consideration. 

 

Attribute filtering searches only on whatever is currently visible, and then narrows that further.

 

If you don't want to expand all stacks before filtering, you could use a Smart Collection approach instead. That always starts from the entire image library, and narrows down to fewer images only as its own inclusion criteria dictate.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 5, 2020

    I have always been very frusterated by the Stack-Search Dilema. I both understand that if you have 1000 Stacks and each one has (say 3.5) images in each Stack, and each image could be the "find" of a search, than you will return with 3500 images which is useless. On the other hand, as Jarnoa has also discovered, the current structure prevents very easy searches from functioning at all.

     

    I like Richard Plondon's approach in that it bypasses the whole problem and makes the innocuous Smark Collection an effective bypass to the problem. 

     

    I still have other issues with Stacks (such as no easy mechanism to remove an entire Stack as easily as one can a photo or a group of photos) but I tip my had to Richard for solving this issue.

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    October 5, 2020

    As far as I know, searches will only find images that match the search criteria when they are unstacked or at the top of the stack. You can use Photo->Stacking->Expand All Stacks before you do the search.

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