Lightroom: Exact text match in smart collections and filters, including matching spaces

Here's an easier method. Try 'Start With' rather than 'Contains All' or 'Contains Words'.

Marco,

Thank you for your suggestions of using synonyms. I tried it for this smart collection and it seems to have solved my problem. I will have to start using synonyms when I run into problems like this and then go back and edit my existing keywords as I have time. I have just short of 450 people in my catalog so it is a little frustrating to consider editing that many keywords as a work-around for something Lightroom should do easily.

I also appreciate learning about your workflow tags. I always love to see how other people make the program work for them.

Thanks!

John,

I was using "contains all" instead of "contains words." Unfortunately switching to "contains words" made my problem worse (collection went from 754 images to 51,128). But thank you for making me aware of the distinction because it solved a different problem I was having.

My dilemma for this collection is that I am trying to create a collection of photos of all the pets in my life (don't judge me). This would include ten (so far) keywords. Originally I was only using a first name for the pets' keywords but there are several of the pets (Riley, Molly, Abbey, and Addison) who share the name of real people in my collection.  So I thought adding last names to my pets' keywords would solve the problem but that led me to stumbling upon the problem which is the topic of this thread - Lightroom doesn't recognize spaces in keywords. So, for example, a smart collection containing the words "Riley Findlow" (my dog) includes false positives for any picture that includes the person "Riley Robertson" plus anyone in my family whose last name is Findlow. This leads me to the conclusion that smart collections are useless. If I wanted to wade through thousands of pictures to find the ones of my pets, I could do that in File Explorer on my computer.

I appreciate you feedback (especially because that explained why looking for pictures of Niko also pulled in every picture I'd taken on my Nikon). I will just have to hope Adobe cares enough to make what seems like an easy and intuitive fix.

My workaround is to create keywords (that don't export) without spaces.
They are like placeholders to filter more easily on.
Instead the real keyword (with spaces) is in the synonyms.



This would be how I would tag a photo that has me in it.
For people in my family tree, a unique identification number (RIN051 in this case) is used that corresponds to the ID number in the family tree database.
But my friend John Doe would have JohnDoe as non-exporting keyword, and John, John Doe and Doe as synonyms.

I use this for workflow as well, but without synonyms, because I won't be exporting these workflowkeywords at all.
Some examples:

• DoNotX > I have culled these photos and although they are no picks, I don't want to reject them.
  So a smart collection for culling might look like:
  Keywords doesn't contain "DoNotX" and Flag is "Unflagged"
• ToTagPeople> I haven't tagged all the people in this picture yet
• TaggedPeople> All people are tagged (if I would create a smart filter based on "Tag People", these might show up as well) 

Like John R. Ellis says you can also use the library filter.
Or you can look up the keyword in the keywordlist and click the arrow on the right side. That will also return any image that contains that keyword.

"I want a smart collection that pulls in John Smith, but it is also pulling in John Doe and Mary Smith"

It sounds like you're using the "contains" operator, e.g.

Keywords contain John Smith

That will match photos that contain the string "John" or "Smith" anywhere in their keywords.  E.g. it will match a photo with the single keyword "Johnson" and a photo with the single keyword "blacksmith". 

Instead, use "contains words":

Keywords contains words John Smith

This will match photos that contain both "John" and "Smith" in their keywords as punctuated-separated "words". That will significantly reduce the number of false matches, though you can still get some; e.g. it will match a photo with the two keywords "John Doe" and "Bob Smith".

You might consider using the Library Filter bar instead of smart collections -- its Metadata browser is the only way to get exact keyword match (without using a plugin), and you can search for a keyword with a single mouse-click.  See the end of this post for details:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/11153430#11153430

I'd like to be able to click on existing keywords/people to create a smart collection. This would simplify the smart collection creation process and avoid the problem I am currently encountering of my smart collection pulling in the wrong images. (I want a smart collection that pulls in John Smith, but it is also pulling in John Doe and Mary Smith -- all three people exist as keywords but Lightroom is treating first and last names as individual words instead of the first and last name of each person as an individual unit). It seems like I should be able to create a new smart collection and then just click from my keywords which ones I want to include.

And on a different note, keywords seem like an obvious search tool so why do I have to dig through an additional layer to find them when I am creating smart collections (i.e. you have to click on "Other Metadata" to find the keyword option)?

First of all, merging these post LEAVES OUT a lot of pertinent information from the other posts that seem to be relevant to the issue.  The only way to see them is to follow the links.  Makes it more difficult to resolve issues

Onto the main topic.
This comment is from a linked post.


Johan's above suggestion works great.  As this smart collection filter has been requested in several posts I would think I should be fairly easy to add a choice in the smart collection to do this as in the above scenario.  The filtering programming code is already written as it works as above so it just needs to be added to the smart collections.

I suspect there is a simple solution for this, but as an example, if I have a key word "estate" and another one "real estate" and a third "MacKenzie King Estate". When I do a search/filter for "estate" I get all three whether I uses "contain"/"contain all"/"contain words".

Are there special characters I can use to select the images with the single word keyword "estate"??

Or am I stuck with getting them all or dreaming up a new set of one word keywords?

Thanks

Pleeeaaassse fix!!  Keywords need to be able to contain white space.  I have integrations with other areas that require the white space.  Consequently, I am locked out of using smart collections until this bug gets fixed.  Implement a regex feature.  Thanks.

As I said, it's approximate -- "Contains Words" excludes more than "Contains" or "Contains All", but it doesn't exclude all the unwanted keywords.