Search by year only

[pbutche]

I'm posting my question to find if there's a better way to achieve my goal. My project is based on scanned images, not digital creations. So I do not have EXIF data to capture. I am also actively researching the potential years of past events, so I may be working with images and lack the date of such events. 

Once I do find the information, I manually update the metadata for the capture date to the month/day/year of each event. 

What I want to do is search the year a photo was taken, but not required to select month/day. I want to see "all" 1976 photos, for example. 

I know I can keyword this option, and that is the solution I did use. But I can't help but feel that I'm missing something obvious.

I can also sort by Capture Date. This doesn't help as I have over 700k images. 

So I wanted to ask, is there a way to search (not sort) images based on capture year only?

Lightroom classic; on MAC. 

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

If you are talking about Lightroom Classic (which you didn't say), and the year is in the Capture Date metadata field (which you did say), then use the Filter bar. https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/finding-photos-catalog.html

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

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Here's a screenshot of @dj_paige's solution to use the Library Filter bar:

You could also use a smart collection with this criterion:

[pbutche]

AH... THANK YOU for the screenshot. I did not see the same results that you posted and I dug around and realized my metadata was flat and NOT set to heirarchical! When I made that change, I was able to see the 'year' as an option to select. What a difference this makes!  I wanted to post this information for any other newbies struggling with this - set your metadata option from flat to heirarchacle for DATE.