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P: Advanced Folder Search options?

Explorer ,
Dec 18, 2024 Dec 18, 2024

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Does anyone know if it's possible to filter the folders in the Folder Panel using any kind of logical operators or anything more advanced than every word being an OR search?

For example, I have a bunch of folder names containing the term "Final X", such as 2018.06.08 - Final X Lincoln and 2023.06.09-10 - Final X & BTS. If I type in final in the Filter Folders search bar, it will filter all of those Final X folders, but it will also include folders like "Final Images" or "Tournament Finals".

 

Screenshot 2024-12-18 10.19.17.pngexpand image

 

That's all well and good. But then if I try to filter it further, by entering final x, I end up adding in any folder name that contains the letter x, like OBX 2012 and Exported, instead of further filtering down to folders that contain the entire search term.

 

Screenshot 2024-12-18 10.21.32.pngexpand image


I've tried adding quotation marks around it (both single and double) like "final x", enclosing the term in parentheses (), brackets [], and braces {}, using a boolean operator like final AND x. None of those do anything.


Any ideas?

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11 Comments
Community Expert ,
Dec 18, 2024 Dec 18, 2024

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No, there's nothing like that. It's a very basic filtering.

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Explorer ,
Dec 18, 2024 Dec 18, 2024

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I didn't think so, but I was hoping to be wrong. Thanks for the response.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 18, 2024 Dec 18, 2024

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You can make a Smart Collection that searches for images depending on multiple criteria concerning the name of their folder, of course involving other attributes of the image too as you wish.

 

You choose whether [ALL need to be true] / [ANY need to be true] logic is used.

 

Thus you could require the inclusion of one text string WITH the inclusion of another text string.

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Explorer ,
Dec 18, 2024 Dec 18, 2024

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That would make sense if I'm trying to filter the photos in those folders, but I'm looking more for the folders themselves.

 

One specific situation is that I want to see which years I went to a particular event. Since the photos themselves live on drives that aren't always attached to my computer, or I don't even have access to when I'm on the road, I can't easily access, view, and filter the folders themselves. And even when I do have them, it is much faster and efficient to go to a living list of what's on all 10-ish of my archive drives than to plug them in and try to locate annual events over the course of 15 years, ya know?

 

The Lightroom catalog has all the information I'm looking for and should be able to easily filter down so I can see the folders all in one spot, regardless of what drive they're on or whether I have access to the actual files at the time. The rudimentary filtering that the search bar provides is good. I use it all the time and it very frequently does enough. It also doesn't feel like much of a jump for it to be much better. I'm not a coder, though, so I could be way off on this. Or maybe I'm just an edge case and noone else would find it useful.

 

I was hoping I'd just be missing something, but I wasn't too optimistic haha. I feel like I know the program pretty well, buuuut I know I don't know everything, too, so I threw it out there. Thanks for the reponse!

 

Maybe we can turn this into a feature request, @Rikk Flohr: Photography?

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LEGEND ,
Dec 19, 2024 Dec 19, 2024

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[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

 

"I want to see which years I went to a particular event."

 

If the photos are keyworded with the event name, you can first filter by that keyword. Then use the Library Filter bar's Metadata browser with the Date column to see a summary of all the capture-date years:

 

JohnREllis_0-1734644821010.pngexpand image

 

This will work regardless of whether the drives containing the photos are currently online or offline.

 

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Explorer ,
Dec 19, 2024 Dec 19, 2024

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@johnrellis That's definitely another way to approach it, thanks.

 

It's still far faster to use the limited folder filter than to wait for just my date data to load. When I click All Photographs, it takes about 40 seconds to load the Date info in the Metadata filter, whereas I can filter my folder names in about 1 second.

 

Screenshot 2024-12-19 19.43.39.pngexpand image

 

One of the perils of such a massive archive!

 

Plus, the folder filter still gets me closer to the information I'm aiming for, which is folder/event info, not file info. Depending on the particulars I'm trying to investigate, those keyword/searchable text field filters might include lots of irrelevant photos, and I won't really know what they are without looking at the folders they're in anyway. Because my organization is so event-centric, the folder names themselves are essentially my keywording, in a sense.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 20, 2024 Dec 20, 2024

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Do you not use the Job Identifier field? It's one of the few fields that Lightroom makes directly searchable through Smart Collections or the Library Filter, and so it can provide a structure which groups multiple folders or cope when folder names are inconsistent to gather everything related to a job/event.

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Explorer ,
Dec 20, 2024 Dec 20, 2024

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@john beardsworth I haven't used the Job Identifier field, no. I do rename my files to include something about the event, so I capture it in the photo filenames. My format is yyyy.mm.dd_identifier_0000.ext so I've always got the relevant info right there. Makes it really nice when I've got photos of a person in a folder and they're all dated and identified in list view. Makes sorting really nice and easy to find particular events as well when looking through the files themselves in Explorer or Dropbox. I could add additional info in a field like Job Identifier, but that feels duplicative. Perhaps I don't know enough about it to imagine how I could use it.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 20, 2024 Dec 20, 2024

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I always encourage people to use Job because LR makes this field so easy to filter or use in smart collections.

 

Yes, adding a job can duplicate some information, but that applies to a lot of the metadata we commonly put in LR fields. Keywords or titles can often duplicate the info in the folder name or file names, but each one allows us different ways to search in LR and more flexibility over search criteria.

 

Imagine a job photographing an event over a few days, maybe over a period, so for instance a wedding job from the "2024-01-24 Jones Watson engagement party" folder and other folders up to the day itself. Making the Job "Joe Jones and Lucy Watson wedding" means you can name individual folders as you want - with shorter and more readable names, for instance, or more accurately describing a day "2024-09-24 Joe Jones Riga stag trip". You also got just a few shots of the city which weren't really wedding/client-related, so maybe leave the job empty for them? That's quicker than creating a new folder for those few images, if that's what you might do, and maybe next week you'll change your mind and one or two of those photos helps tell that day's story. Folders are meant for storage, and they're inflexible as a way of categorising pictures.

 

Later you want to gather all the job's photos, and a smart collection gathers that job's photos with Job / Contains All Joe Jones and Lucy Watson wedding. Now, each time you want that job's photos, you don't have to type Jones Watson into the Folders panel's filter box, and then filter out the non-wedding photos. When you want to create a portfolio of your best wedding photos, you might filter on 5 stars and the wedding keyword, and then another Library Filter column is the Job so you can see you're not including too many from one event or wonder why a job is missing (because back then you used 4 stars for the best?).

 

It all goes back to giving yourself different ways to search and more flexibility over search criteria, and it's easy to overlook how Job is one of the few fields that LR makes fully searchable.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 20, 2024 Dec 20, 2024

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"Folders are meant for storage, and they're inflexible as a way of categorising pictures."

 

This is a crucial insight IMO.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 20, 2024 Dec 20, 2024

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I think it helps a lot of people, so I normally add a couple of other guiding ideas:

  • "Folders are meant for storage, and they're inflexible as a way of categorising pictures."
  • Use keywords and other metadata fields for categorising and describing your photos
  • Use collections for collecting and gathering photos as and when you need them

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