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

[areohbee]

Is there really no way to search metadata for a term that has spaces in it? e.g. "brown hair".

[Samoreen]

Hi,

Keyword1 = St. Peters
Keyword2 = St. Paul and Peters

There is no way to filter on "St. Peters" in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Paul", which is not a practical solution.

Keyword1 = John
Keyword2 = John Kennedy

These are 2 different keywords. There is no way to filter on John in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Kennedy", although John is a different keyword than John Kennedy ("Separate keywords using commas" set in the Preferences - Spaces are allowed in keywords).

Normally, filtering with Keywords / End with / John should be enough to isolate images with the "John" keyword and exclude those with "John Kennedy".

Problem reported the first time 5 years ago, still not fixed in version 6.4. Any developer should be able to fix this in minutes.

[Crystal Visionary]

A feature I would like to see in Lightroom is the ability to search for exact phrases. For example be able to use something like quotation marks to search for "Red Rock Canyon" in the key words and only get results that have the words Red, Rock and Canyon next to each other and not results like "Red cars climb rocks in Bob's Canyon" which is possible with the current search tool.

[areohbee]

Presently there is no way to search for "brown hair" without matching everything that has "brown" or "hair" in it. - is there?

This seems like a glaring shortcoming - am I missing something?

[rctneil]

This issue has been annoying me since I started using Lightroom. Very very very frustrating. Please fix Adobe!

Let's get this more widely known and hopefully it should push up their priority list a bit further!

[damoncrane]

Yup. This is ridiculous. Please fix Adobe.

[robgendreau]

PUHLEEZE fix this.

I can't believe that in 2016 this is still an issue. I have to at times use other applications just to do what Lr should do itself.

[damoncrane]

This is comical too. I am trying to create a smart collection to find a work around. Inside a collection set? Sure, why not. This is the scroll bar I'm confronted with. No option to click in and out of the hierarchy, just an endless scroll with not even an indicator where I am in the scroll!? I have about 200,000 images so the scroll would take an hour. I'm getting the feeling Lightroom isn't built for people with large collections

[damoncrane]

Oh yeah, and after you search for something and try to scroll down to see what has been returned, it keeps kicking you back to the top for a few minutes until it settles down. It feels like the 90's sometimes in Lightroom.

[damoncrane]

Whats wrong with using quotation marks to show a string of words, or heaven forbid some kind of smart filter. Adobe seem great at making tools to edit photos, and absolutely shocking at making it easy to navigate a huge library. The thing that makes me laugh/cry is when the folder tree gets over two or three items, or if the folder name is longer than a word or two, you can't swipe left and right to see what is there, it just goes: Fu... or It... haha, good luck with that, what a nightmare, you can't just left click or keyboard shortcut to rename either. You have to right click, select rename, see what the name is, rinse repeat. Miserable.

[johnrellis]

Lee Hawkins wrote, "...a smart collection that is supposed to contain "little planets" and it also happens to pick up "My Little Pony" pictures as well...".

It sounds like you may have used the criterion:

Collection contains little planets

That will match any collection that contains "little" or "planets". If instead you used:

Collection contains words little planets

that will match only collections that contain the words "little" and "planets". That's still not exact match, e.g. it would also match a collection "Planets that are very little", but it would reduce the number of accidental matches quite a bit.

But I agree wholeheartedly that LR has botched the search features by omitting exact match. Don't know what the product developers were thinking...

[Lee in CLE]

This needs to be fixed. It is really aggravating to have a smart collection that is supposed to contain "little planets" and it also happens to pick up "My Little Pony" pictures as well...

[areohbee]

To the forum admin behind the curtain:

Consider converting this to a feature request.

[areohbee]

SpaceUrchin solves this problem.

UPDATE: AnyFilter also solves this problem

[areohbee]

The metadata itself has no delimiters.

But in the UI, there needs to be the concept of delimiter if its to support multiple terms in a single search box.

The solution could be a "no delimiters" checkbox - when checked it means search for entered text verbatim. Another common solution is to employ quote marks, but that has the problem that quote marks can be a legal metadata character, so then you have to define an escape character. One could also have a "Contains Verbatim If Substring", and a "Contains Verbatim If Whole"..., but that would just add to the confusion... ;-}

[johnrellis]

The inability to do exact match of multiple keywords is a glaring omission, especially for those with large, controlled keyword hierarchies. While it's possible to select a single keyword in the Keyword List pane, you can't select more than one (Boolean "and"). You can select multiple keywords in a Library Filter column, but scrolling a column with thousands of keywords is painful, partly because Adobe has a non-standard micro scrollbar that's fussy to use. And the only way to do more complicated queries is to use Smart Collections, which can't do exact match of keywords (or other string-valued fields).

[alanterra]

Just my 2¢, but I really don't miss this feature.

Being able to click on a multiword keyword (in Keyword List or Metadata panel) to get an exact match, + being able to set up Smart Collection with "Keywords contains Words", is fine for me.

All I want keywords to do are to show me all the photos that meet the criteria I need. If there are a few others (for instance images keyed "hair brown" as well as "brown hair"), it doesn't bother me.

[areohbee]

Unless I'm mistaken, this has to be considered a serious flaw in metadata handling - we need to be able to find things even when they have spaces in them!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm really surprised there is no option to filter by an 'is' command.  For example if have a keyword for a player number 6 and there is also a player number 66 if I try to create a smart album by keyword '6' it will come up with '66' as well since under keyword there is only the option for 'contains' no 'is'.  So to work around this I have to add a letter or other symbol to make the 6 unique.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The keyword search filter could have a way of searching for the exact term, and the possibility of having several exact terms, eg "Rafael Rosa", "Edson Rosa" In that term it would only find the words bracketed with quotation marks. full term, so you could find more exact terms, not just from the names

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

LR needs facility to match "exactly" the keywords being searched for. Often use two words like small pearl bordered when there is also a different species as pearly bordered. searching doesn't allow them to be separated and brings up both lots. This is a fault in my book and need to be bale to search for two words with spaces in between.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Coming from Aperture, I'm flabbergasted that this isn't supported by default. I can't imagine how the design process of this feature could leave something like this out... Anyway, I voted, but given that this post is 5 years old it seems like Adobe couldn't care less. Quite ridiculous, really.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

When using Lightroom, I have tagged my photos with keywords, some of which contain spaces. However, I don't seem to be able to create an accurate smart collection using these keywords. For example, I have friends "John Adam", "Adam Peters" and "John Smith". When I try to create a smart set for "John Adam", I also get all the photos that have both "Adam Peters" and "John Smith" in them. I seem to get either too many photos or none, depending on what options I choose for the "contains" setting. Any ideas on how I can make smart collections work using keywords with spaces?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'd be curious how often is a comma is actually used as part of a keyword string. More often than not, in most software, it seems the comma is the delimiter between keywords. So people that use a comma as part of their keyword collection have to adjust, while the rest of us (a majority?) could use the space as just another character in a keyword string. How about some feedback regarding commas used within a keyword?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

One could argue that metadata come in two flavours: those delimited by whitespace, and those delimited by something else, like a comma. Adobe have chosen the first one, which implies that you should be able to make a gesture that can exclusively search for anything between a delimiter.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

If the various free-form search terms support special chars like - + and quotes, someone from Adobe should speak up.