Participating Frequently

Answered

Search photos by metadata - how?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 22, 2018
3 replies
2623 views

I want to search or apply a filter by metadata, e.g.

Photos with ISO 1000 to 2000

Or Photos with the 24-70 mm f/2.8 VR lens

Or Photos taken at 200 mm focal length

etc etc

Lightroom "Classic" CC let us do this with filters and smart folders.

Before I can consider migrating 600 GB of photographs to Lightroom CC, I need to be able to search & filter via metadata.

Is this feature planned or forgotten?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer john beardsworth

Lightroom CC is not as good as real Lightroom at filtering - just keywords, cameras, locations. While it may improve and add some extra fields, it is unlikely that it ever will be a match.

Where it is better is in applying AI to searching for untagged images, if you are online.

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

I doubt cloudy Lightroom will ever get the sort of searching power present in Classic. It's been asked for for many years ever since the first versions. It is just diametrically opposed to the design philosophy and the intended audience for the software I think. I don't have any insight though but you can see from the approach the team has taken with this you can see that this sort of stuff is definitely not a priority but the AI stuff (which is utterly useless to me but does appeal to the target audience I am guessing) is.

D

dannymac85

Participant

This feature seems to be improved, but still doesn't seem to support ranges of values.

For example; I'd love to be able to filter out all the images in the focal length ranges 30-40mm, instead i have to filter 30mm, 31mm, 32mm etc individually. There are "Wide Angle", "Normal Focal Length", and "Telephoto" filters but I haven't been able to find any documentaiton on exactly what is included.

I am trying to figure out what my most used focal lengths are as part of a move from APC-S to Full Frame. Filtering is greatly improved since I first started using Lightroom CC, but it sounds like Lightroom Classic is still much better for this kind of filtering/analysis.

olivierlacan

Known Participant

Ditto, it still seems impossible to search by width or height to try and filter images which are above or below a specific resolution threshold for example. That alone would enable systematic usage of the machine learning "Enhance" feature by allowing users to find photos that would benefit from upscaling.

For now it's a missed opportunity.

john beardsworth

Correct answer

Community Expert

Lightroom CC is not as good as real Lightroom at filtering - just keywords, cameras, locations. While it may improve and add some extra fields, it is unlikely that it ever will be a match.

Where it is better is in applying AI to searching for untagged images, if you are online.

F

fastharperAuthor

Participating Frequently

AI is fine if I want to search for photos of trees

But if I want a histogram of what focal lengths on which lenses I use the most, metadata searching is the only way

Or if I want to apply noise reduction to images between ISO 20000 and 25000 in one shot; and then 25000 to 30000 in one shot... metadata filtering is the only way

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Sure, I understand. One would expect that those fields may eventually be added to LRCC - they are more likely than some other fields - but maybe Adobe think the target market doesn't need them? LR Classic lets you filter on both those fields and many more, so that's where you probably need to be. No point migrating to LRCC until or if it meets your needs....

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