smart collections filtering by specific keyword in keyword tree

​@drtonyb it will match “Blue Jay” if that belongs to Birds - it’s a blue bird, but how will it match “big birds” which fails to match “blue”?

 

All of the filtering and smart-collection operators treat Keywords as a single set of words containing all the space-separated words from all the keywords explicitly and implicitly assigned to the photo. 

In particular, the criterion Keywords Contains Words w1 w2 … wn is true if each of the words wi is a space-separated word in at least one of the explicit or implicit keywords assigned to the photo. In the example above, “blue” is a space separated word in the keyword “blue jay” and “birds” is a space-separated word in “big birds”.

This is directly relevant to Daniel’s questions, e.g.

• if I work  with keyword trees, for instance I do have “birds” and inside two other keywords “small” and “big”. Some photos do only have “birds” and other do only have “small” or “big”. If I ask the filter to show “birds” it also shows those photos with “small” or “big” keyword and that do not have the “birds”.

When LR’s keywording was initially designed circa 2005-2006, tag clouds were all the rage among techies, and many web sites and apps with user-generated content were encouraging people to liberally use free-form tagging with whatever terms came to mind.  LR’s keyword search was designed with that free-form tagging in mind. 

Hierarchical controlled vocabularies came later to LR, but the keyword search was not so carefully thought out, which explains why there has never been exact-match operators for keywords.

Thus the longstanding workarounds suggested by Johan and me.

This is a classical dilemma, especially if all kinds of combinations are possible in the photos. Here’s the example I always use:

You have three people appearing in your images; John Doe, Jane Doe and John Smith. They are friends, so all combinations exist in your photos. You have photos of John Doe on his own, John and Jane Doe together, John Smith and Jane Doe together, John Doe and John Smith together, and photos of all three of them.

Now here’s you mission, if you choose to accept it: Create a smart collection that selects all photos of John Doe (alone or with any of the other two). Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But there’s a catch: make sure you do not get photos with just John Smith and Jane Doe together…

In principle there is a solution: create a smart collection with Match All: Keywords begins with John Doe and Keywords ends with John Doe. That should work, but about two years ago it stopped working because of a bug. AFAIK, that bug still exists and so there is no solution anymore.

​@drtonyb if you want the smart collection to show blue birds only, then you need to set the criteria for keywords matching “blue” and “birds” like this: Keywords contains all blue birds

That will match a photo with the keywords “blue jay” and “big birds”. It will also match a photo with the keywords “bluebloods” and “Canadian Snowbirds”. Using “contains words” instead of “contains all” fixes the latter but not the former.

​@danielm49702136 

I don’t think your questions have been answered properly yet. You asked:

if the keyword has many words for instance “blue birds” and there is also a keyword “birds” if I look for photos with just “birds” it also shows photos of “blue birds”

I am not quite clear what you want here: if you want the smart collection to show blue birds only, then you need to set the criteria for keywords matching “blue” and “birds” like this Keywords contains all blue birds

Alternatively, you could use the Match all of the following rules in a more flexible method like this

However, if you wanted all birds, but no blue birds, you would do this

Next question was:

if I work  with keyword trees, for instance I do have “birds” and inside two other keywords “small” and “big”. Some photos do only have “birds” and other do only have “small” or “big”. If I ask the filter to show “birds” it also shows those photos with “small” or “big” keyword and that do not have the “birds”.

This is the same: if you want small birds only, then set Match: All with Keywords contains birds and Keywords contains small. If you want big birds only, the set Keywords contains birds and Keywords contains big, like this

In the case where you want big or small birds, then you need set the smart collection like this

You get the sub criteria by starting with only the Keywords contains birds, then press Alt on Windows or Option on Mac which changes the [+] button to [#] and clicking the [#] starts a sub criteria block.

The same can be used for dogs and big, dogs and small, dogs and (big or small).

​@johnrellis said:  - Use “_” rather than spaces in your keywords. (A fair number of people do that, but I don’t, since my keywords get published with my photos for others to view.)

Personally, I use “-” instead of “_”.  But when I do so,  I uncheck the “Export this keyword” box and put in the same words with spaces as a synonym and check the box to export the synonym

Pertaining to using a Metadata filter,  If you are on Windows, there is a limit on the number of entries that it can show in a single list (the limit is acutally a pixel limit but has the same affect).  So, if you have a long list of keywords the pull down may only show the first bunch of them.  Having KW’s in a hierarchy and setting the filter to show them as a hierarcy and then only expanding the branches you need usually is sufficient to get around this.   In my case, when viewing as a flat list, it only gets down to “Forest” before hitting the limit.    

It is very strange tha there are so many problems with lightroom that seem very simple to correct and they are still there for years and years. I wont be able to make a smart collection with simple rules with Ligthroom capabilites. Any filter plugin is excellent and does much more than what I do need. 

Not exactly what you asked for, but a possible approach is to go to the Keyword List panel, then find “blue birds” and hover your mouse over it until an arrow appears at the right side of the Keyword List Panel on that row, click on the arrow. This will give you all of your photos with the “blue birds” keyword. (Oops looks like ​@johnrellis has beaten me to it)

Not a smart collection, but these are the photos you want.

By the way, isn’t bluebird one word? That would solve some of your problems.

Also, if “blue birds” are a keyword under “birds”, get creative and instead of “Birds” use “Aves”.

I’m afraid there is not much you can do about this. Lightroom Classic does not work with keyword phrases, so a keyword “blue bird” is handled as if it’s two keywords, ‘blue’ and ‘bird’. That makes it extra difficult if you use the same words (big, small) in more than one hierarchy. And to make it worse, there is a bug where ‘begins with’ and ‘ends with’ does not work correctly in smart collections. Using ‘begins with birds’ and ‘ends with birds’ as criteria would normally make it possible to select images with only ‘birds’ as keyword, and not get ‘blue birds’, but that no longer works.