Filter by Camera Make

[MGW2010]

Is there a way to filter by camera make (e.g. Canon, Nikon or Sony) rather than individual camera models?

[GoldingD]

Here is one way:

[Conrad_C]

Another similar way is to create a Smart Collection with a rule with the criteria “contains” “Canon”.

Either way, you can save it for future use. The filter can be saved as a named filter preset, and the Smart Collection of course becomes named and saved in the Collections panel.

[johnrellis]

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"Another similar way is to create a Smart Collection with a rule with the criteria “Camera contains Canon."

Unfortunately, that won't work with many cameras, which don't include the make in the EXIF Camera Model field (e.g. some Nikons and most Sonys).

A more precise search that will work is "Searchable EXIF contains words Sony".

The most precise search is to use the Any Filter plugin:

[Bob Somrak]

Why are you using a free trial @johnrellis .  You should pay yourself for all the great work you have done on AnyFilter😀

[johnrellis]

: - >

[MGW2010]

Am I correct that Lightroom does not store the camera make in the SQLite database?

[johnrellis]

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No, LR does store the camera make in the catalog.  You can see it in the Metadata panel:

The various methods posted previously for searching make all access the Camera Make field in the catalog.

[richardplondon]

The only exception may be where a photo has passed through some kind of postprocessing along the way, which has not preserved this (and similar) information relating to the original taking of the photo. For example, some external utilities may strip this off - or it can be omitted from inclusion in an export - or in Photoshop for example if you made a blank new file, then pasted a photo in as a new layer, the resulting saved PS document would not hold any shooting information metadata relating to that photo. 

So it does depend on the prior lifecycle of whatever image instance you are looking at.

[MGW2010]

You cannot filter on camera make; so I suspect that the Make in your example was read from the individual image file or associated XMP and is not actually stored in the SQLite database.

[johnrellis]

There are many metadata fields stored in the catalog that can't be filtered directly. Many of those, like Camera Make (but not all), can be searched via the aggregate criteria like Searchable EXIF.  Many, like Camera Make (but not all), can be viewed in the Metadata panel.  And many (but not all) can be accessed by plugins.

[richardplondon]

" is not actually stored in the SQLite database" - this information remains visible when a given image's source file and associated XMP become 'not found' externally for whatever reason. So that can't be coming from anywhere else than the database.  The issue is, this particular information field is not presented in Library for filtering by. And nor are a lot of other fields - of which many dozens exist, and differently so for different natures of image. Some of this info occurs in multiple places or is concatenated for display and thus a broader text search approach is likely to work better. An image taken with a Nikon camera will have no reasonable expectation of including the text string "Canon" or "Fujifilm" or whatever, anywhere among its various information fields, so spurious matches (though still possible) will be vanishingly rare. The same will apply to a search for ".nef" in the filename - or whatever.