P: A better search/find in the library module (Library Filter)

[Maxal Tamor]

I have used for many years iView, and then Expression Media to catalog my files, and I must say that even today I did not find nothing better from this point of view (on Mac).

As the actual one is very limited, it will be very nice to implant some more powerful search/find function in the LR Library module.

Something that allow to make very precise researches like, for example:
"Find all the tif or pdf files with a weight > 1 000 000 bytes, a resolution of 300 dpi, an Adobe RGB profile and 16 bits of depth..."

Image is not available

It will be very nice too to have the possibility to personalize more the info on the preview module (for example somebody could be interested to see the weight in MB of each file, of the embedded color profile, or the resolution, or the depth of the file):

Image is not available

[areohbee]

I realize your idea is for native support in Lightroom, and I agree this would be a good feature.

But just so you know, you can do *most* of the search part of this now with the help of DevMeta and ExifMeta.

I say "*most*" because plugins do not support numeric metadata comparisons yet (nor date/time...)

PS - I'm not pushing my plugins, I just thought the OP and/or other readers may be interested in a partial interim solution, that's the only reason I bring it up.

Also, in case you didn't know, you can do some limited customization of the grid view now using 'Library View Options" grid view preferences.

[john beardsworth]

I agree with the original post. Anyone who has used iView/ExMedia misses their search capability. If data is in a database, sooner or later someone will have a very good reason to search on it, so don't second guess which fields they need - make them all searchable.

Take a look at Jeffrey’s “Extended Search” Lightroom Plugin which is specifically designed to fill gaps in Adobe Lightroom's image-search capabilities.

John

PS Rob, you are pushing your plug-ins. You've posted enough about them already.

[areohbee]

No John - I am not.

And I won't stop mentioning my plugins to people, nor yours, nor anybody elses, nor any solutions that don't involve plugins, as long as I think the people who have posted about their needs and desires might benefit from them and appreciate knowing about them. So, you might as well stop riding me...

[Geoff the kiwi]

Rob, if you weren't pushing yours you would have mentioned others like Jeffrey's as well.

[areohbee]

You're wrong Geoff. I wasn't familiar with this plugin of Jeffrey's. How about you get off my back too?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Settle down guys, there's no need for this

[Maxal Tamor]

Thank you John and Rod, I shall take a look to these plugins as soon as possible

[garethjjones]

In Lightroom, though you can show the exposure bias in the view options, you can't filter by this metadata. I frequently want to mark all the -1ev images one colour and all the +1ev images another colour. I imagine others using HDR type techniques may want this too.

[hsbn]

I would love to be able to create Smart Collection that can use various information from Edit History.
For example, I like to create a smart collection to contain all images that has been exported to hard drive (or printed).

[deckard26354]

I very often want to search for images with specific Lightroom-defined properties such as process version (i.e, all images with process version 2012), specific develop settings (Clarity >= 30), etc. None of this information is available via the traditional EXIF based search tools.

Rob Cole's plugin DevMeta comes close to providing this ability, but because it relies on image selection to update it's private cache of Lightroom metadata the results are often out of date. I don't blame this on RC's plugin, but rather the fact that Lightroom doesn't expose this information in the Metadata Filtering functionality. To provide a balance between functionality and performance RC's plugin doesn't extract more nuanced information such as tone curve region parameters or individual curve modifications.

In addition, because the API doesn't allow for sufficiently rich metadata comparisons (contains, start and end) it's impossible to adequately work with this expanded metadata.

At a minimum, everything that RC's DevMeta plugin does should be standard in Lightroom. Metadata comparisons must support numeric, boolean, negation and range comparisons. It would be a bonus if word, list, and regex comparisons were also available.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It is any trick to filter my developed shots that have not used local brushes or graduated filters?

[Klozaw]

Many photographers now batch process stacks of bracketed files. However, they are often of varying stack sizes and intermingled with plenty of non-bracketed single shots.

We need to be able to view ONLY the stacked image sets. There seems to be no solution other than 3rd party SW or to label all your stacks with colors or keywords, etc. then filtering.

With all the people using HDR this seems like a logical feature to add immediately

Thank you,

Kevin

[10greenmen]

It would be extremely useful to be able to sort or filter by file size (and megapixel too). for example, if you have a run an action there may be files that are small (eg cropped or reduced in size) or large (because they have multiple layers still embedded - I run an action and then open the files to do do final layer opacity changes etc). I keep having to go to Finder to fine files that need to be opened, then you have to fiddle to find the right ones. Its just not clever to not have this funciton - Bridge has it

[hungchi]

There is a nice feature for smart collections that allow filtering keywords by "are empty" and "aren't empty"

I would like to filter images by X number of keywords.
It's great to have a collection that tells me that there are no keywords but if I add only one keyword I then have to find the image by that keyword.

As a work flow this "are empty" and "aren't empty" isn't adequate. I want to start with images with no keywords, then work through images with 1 keyword and 2 etc. by using multiple smart collections.

I know this is a database issue because of the data type used for keywords. As such this would require a secondary function to "count" the keywords and store that data so we can easily filter images by the number of keywords.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

On top of my wishlist is the ability to create a smart filter that counts the applied keywords.
I often want to search for photos containing (for instance) less than 15 keywords.

[dorin_nicolaescu]

The Parse&Audit function of John Beardy's Search, Replace, Transfer plug-in establishes a metadata filter column based on the number of keywords.

[johnrellis]

To summarize from previous comments in this thread and the other merged threads: There are a number of plugins that can help with the issues raised here. They generally aren't as good as having the functionality built-in to Lightroom, but they usually get the job done with a minimum of fuss:

Search, Replace, and Transfer: provides a number of additional criteria to filters and smart-collections, including whether title/headline/event/caption fields are empty, the number of assigned keywords, the month of a photo's date.
http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/...

DevMeta: makes all develop settings, e.g. Luminance or Sharpening Amount, available as filter and smart-collection criteria.
http://www.robcole.com/Rob/ProductsAn...

ExifMeta: makes all EXIF and camera-specific metadata available as filter and smart-collection criteria.
http://www.robcole.com/Rob/ProductsAn...

Extended Search: provides additional criteria for filtering and smart collections, including crop status, aspect ratio, virtual-copy status, stack status, exposure bias, additional text-matching operators for common text fields.
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-good...

Any Filter: lets you search virtually all fields, metadata, and settings visible in Lightroom and many that aren't (305 in total), with more complete matching operators.
http://www.johnrellis.com/lightroom/a...

[John Christian Caldwell]

The feature would allow a search, or a Smart Collection perhaps, of files where Print existed as a history state. Along the same lines, the search/filter functionality might permit entry of Date, or date ranges, that Printing was performed.

John Caldwell

[sebastien_barre]

As of LR3, only the "Capture Date" field is available for use in a Smart collection rule. I'd love to see:

- "Capture Month": i.e., a field matching only the month, whatever the day or year is. I try to always keyword a photo with the *name* of the month it was taken in. It makes my life much easier with respect to 3rd party websites and external APIs (faster than looking at the EXIF), and I can look for photos that were taken specifically in autumn for example. Right now, my smart collection rule "No April" that test if a photo needs to be "fixed" because its "Capture Date" is in April but it doesn't have the April keyword is *humongous*; I have to pile "Capture Date is in the range 2011-04-01 to 2011-04-31", "Capture Date is in the range 2010-04-01 to 2010-04-31", "Capture Date is in the range 2009-04-01 to 2009-04-31", etc back to 10 years in the past under a "Any of the following are true". Clumsy, and slow. My "Mislabeled April" is equally fun, the same huge list going back 10 years, and test if any of the keyword contains January, February, March, etc. all months except April.

- Capture Time: same principle, only match against the time, not the date. It could be used with "Capture Month" to create a smart collection of all the photos taken during "Golden hour" for example (around sunset/sunrise).

Thanks

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I would like to be able to use Smart Collections to show only images that have been Stacked. I use stacks to manage my images that need to be merged for HDR and Panorama's and being able to create a Smart Collection that would show only the images that are Stacked would be great. Also, please show them stacked not unstacked.

Thanks,

Robert

[johnrellis]

The Any Filter plugin lets you match against the month, day of month, day of week, and time of day.

[Klozaw]

I second that request!

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Thanks for a great summary John

[cliffclof]

I like the base idea of this request that a better search is needed. I think this feature request could be tightened up and more focused to alleviate confusion. It seems as though two separate topics are being requested here.

My 2¢; Best full featured open search I have seen is Windows 7 folder search bar, it is simple, quick to type a search string into, and extremely powerful when paired with a knowledge of nearly never ending commands that can be passed into it.

[areohbee]

I hope, even if Adobe implements a search UI "confined to an iddy-biddy space" that there is also an option to use a full-sized dialog box, with all options presented.., instead of the "rubik's cube" UI design which has become so popular (e.g. Windows search facility)

I guess I'm just old-fashioned...