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

Report · Oct 13, 2011

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

Report · Apr 03, 2017

Did you mean to say Blog? If so, how do I access the blog?

Report · Mar 09, 2017

Still not fixed in 2015.9.

Anyone at Adobe needing an SQL course ?

Report · Jul 16, 2016

That's kinda the whole basis behind Lr. It was designed to be modular like that.

Perhaps you'd like Bridge better; it was designed differently, for things like very rapid browsing through folders.

Report · Jul 16, 2016

Exactly! Catalogues, the indexed file structure is shambolic. You can't edit anything quickly and you can't scroll through a list of names without it buffering. So poorly designed.

Report · Jul 16, 2016

Folder organization?

Report · Jul 16, 2016

Yeah, the search function and folder organisation features are beyond embarrassing. It's a shocker really. Not fit for managing a large database of images. Seems Adobe don't monitor their own forums though.

Report · Jul 16, 2016

I've received responses from John R Ellis and Simon Chen and can't answer on the links provided as closed.
I have used the "contain words" but this doesn't change the search result. I put in "pearl bordered' and search brings up "small pearl bordered" as well. This means a lot of sifting through to get to what I want. the whole idea of a search is to find exactly what I want. This use to be a search in Aperture I believe where you can search for "exactly" and this is what is needed in LR.

Report · Jun 07, 2016

I'm also a software engineer and I confirm that fixing this kind of issue is a matter of minutes.

This bug belongs to what I have called the "permanent bugs" family. They are here since years and they will never be fixed. Nobody cares. They have become a product's signature. They belong to it. If they were fixed, Lightroom would no longer be Lightroom. More seriously, the mere idea of priority list is the basic reason for which they will never be fixed : there will always be a more urgent major bug to fix. They will never reach the top of the list. There are dozens of such bugs in Lightroom. So commenting about the priority list doesn't make sense.

Actually, there should be two different teams (persons?) dedicated to fixing bugs. One that would take care of urgent bugs, those preventing the product to be used normally and one fixing those minor, so irritating bugs that can be quickly fixed. This team should start working with the bugs at the bottom of the list.

Report · Jun 06, 2016

It is definitely the latter. I'm a software architect and I can tell you for certain that this would be one of the easiest things in the world to add. Lightroom's .lrcat file is actually just an SQLite database file in disguise - the application simply queries the database using SQL, and from memory I'm pretty sure the tables are structured such that keywords are stored in a relational table rather than as a comma separated string the way they appear in the UI, which would make it trivially easy to query the database for strings containing spaces, and the UI changes required to implement the feature would also be very simple.

Clearly nobody who has any influence over product specification is looking at this thread, otherwise they would have at least responded to the request. Perhaps there are other more effecting ways of communicating the requirement to Adobe we should look into?

Report · Jun 06, 2016

I am quite sure it is the latter. This type of text search is basic stuff that is included in nearly all database management systems. Adobe has not given this part of the produce a high priority since the problem has been around for years. Having done some programming myself, I can tell you it is not that difficult to do.

Report · Jun 06, 2016

Either there is something incompatible with how LR's database engine works and doing these type of searches isn't easy, or Adobe has not prioritized making this sort of change.

Even if Adobe is working on it (and they'd never tell the public what they're working on until it's ready) I'd guess something like this would not happen in the middle of a version series, though, and we're up to LR 6.5/2015.5, so maybe LR 7 or LR 2016 (if those are the next versions) but not before.

Report · Jun 06, 2016

I agree fully. I have no use for lightroom mobile, small screen, not color corrected. It is a solution looking for a problem.

Report · Jun 02, 2016

Quite. If I wanted a top of the line photo processing program, I'd spend all my time in Photoshop. This goes double for the mobile Lightroom app, where I don't want to process my shots on the non-colour-corrected screen of an iPhone, but I would quite like to get on with keywording, titling and rating...

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Yes. This a thousand times over. How can they be so good at something so complex but have such a horrible database management system. The mind boggles.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Done it. If anyone is good at social media or is a member of photographic communities where I'm sure a great many people are affected by this, maybe post it there and ask for support. Its an absurd omission from the software that really ought to be addressed.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Damon, please be sure to "me too" (vote) for this topic.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Yeah, the forum software isn't great at handling merges of topics and posts.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Hi John, I deleted my comment once i realized that this comment of his was a ghost revivified from 4 years ago. I was excited for a moment.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Unfortunately, Rob hasn't been heard from in the LR community for over a year, and his Web site and plugins are no longer available. :-<

Report · Mar 03, 2016

Hi Rob. Can't figure out any other way to contact you. Good to see your voice here, and just wanted to say Hi and thanks again for your Custom Metadata plugin, I use it all the time.

Report · Dec 18, 2011

Do any of the keywords in 'controlled vocabulary' have spaces?

Report · Oct 17, 2011

I vote for a search solution that works the same and equally well for all metadata types, whether they have spaces, commas, line-feeds, or anything else in them.

Report · Oct 17, 2011

FWIW, you can set a keyword with a comma using, eg, exiftool, and Lightroom will handle it. It just won't let you set that keyword on new photos. I am slowly converting my keywords like "Vegetation, forest" to "Vegetation--Forest" on an as-needed basis.

Report · Oct 14, 2011

Its just not that hard to do it right - hopefully we won't have to settle for a partial solution.

Report · Oct 14, 2011

But if I had a choice of searching keywords that contain spaces working properly all the time, versus a search for a phrase within a caption that might fail because of a comma, I'd take the former. Keywords are just too important in the scheme of things, and having users forced to invent workarounds to a bad design just doesn't make sense.