Where is specific syntax for using "collections" as part of filter specification?

[rodlaird]

There is an option to use "collections" as part of the filter rule set for smart filters.

I cannot find any documentation of how this is supposed to work. Putting in text and using "starts with" or "contains" produces random results.

I have collection hierarchies: is there is syntax to resolve them in the text search? This would seem logical

Any guidance to proper documentation appreciated

R

[john beardsworth]

I don't know of any helpful documentation (see here), but the results won't be random.

• "Starts with" is misleading and should be understood as "any word in collection name starts with". ie it's not "collection name starts with".
• "Contains" matches sequences of characters in the collection names
• Spaces act as "or"
• Collection Sets aren't searched

[rodlaird]

First, hearty thanks John for taking the trouble to respond.

It's turning out useless for me as it smart collections cannot be referenced. Perhaps something we'll see in the future

The documentation is appalling...

[john beardsworth]

It's probably way over the heads of some folk, but below the expectations of anyone with any experience of databases.

I wouldn't expect smart collections or collection sets to be referenced, though Adobe do occasionally add extra fields and incremental changes. But this old article of mine may give you some ideas about how you can squeeze a little more out of what's there.

[dj_paige]

Membership in a collection cannot be accessed by the Filter Bar, so it cannot be a filter. Membership in a collection can be selected as one of the criteria for a Smart collection (although I don't think you can have a smart collection search for membership in another Smart Collection — at least I haven't been able to get that to work) .

It's turning out useless for me as it smart collections cannot be referenced.

As a suggestion, if you use keywords instead of Collections or Smart Collections to help identify photos, you can filter on these and then whatever you want to do with Filters is possible.