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".

[areohbee]

I got your point - its not a good idea to have a legal data character be a delimiter, especially without some way of escaping it. But using a comma as delimiter only solves the problem for keywords - the solution needs to include non-keyword metadata.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That's exactly my point. The use of the space character as a delimiter is what's screwing everything up. The comma should be THE delimiter for separating keywords; everything else, including the space, is just another character in the string.

LR has given a special meaning to the space character. If there's a specific reason, I hope a development person with a logical explanation will jump in here and enlighten us.

[areohbee]

I don't think you can have a comma in a keyword, since its interpreted as a separator upon entry. Even if possible, it would be a *bad* idea...

But you *can* use commas in other metadata items, and this problem applies to non-keyword metadata too.

[areohbee]

I discovered the 'Contains Words' bug when attempting once and for all to understand the difference between the various "Contains..." options. I think Adobe was trying to make it simple, but made it confusing and limiting instead.

Maybe the "Contains..." drop-down could be implemented as named regex presets, and Lightroom could ship with a set that implements the current ones for backward compatibility, but also the users could define their own.

Toss in a checkbox for "ignore case", and a better way of handling delimiters (e.g. specify delimiter explicitly, or have multiple lines instead of delimiters) and I'd be a lot happier.

-R

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I can't even tell the difference between "Contains Words" and "Contains All"

[areohbee]

Hopefully you don't mind if Adobe takes a minute to fix this for the rest of us.

Note: the problem exists not only for keywords, but all other textual metadata, including custom.

*** BEWARE: "Contains Words" still has an insidious bug - it will not always return the photos it should. I think it should be removed from Lightroom completely until it's fixed, which should be immediately, if not sooner - my .02.

Big Mallard Ducks,
Rob

[areohbee]

Based on Adobe's response in the following link, this is being considered a bug: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...