Elements 2019 Find Untagged Items doesn't work

[minnbrit]

When I start the organizer and Find:Untagged items, I get the following.

No media available. Please clear applied filter and try again.

What filters?

[minnbrit]

I did receive the following email, but I see that it never updated my entry.

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On choosing Find > Untagged Items.

All the media files in your catalog that don’t have any
keyword tags, smart tags, people, places, or events assigned are displayed.

You can find more information at: Finding media files by keyword tags in Elements Organizer

Thanks,

Somya.

=======

Having been an Elements user for many years, I am fully aware of how to find untagged items.

That function did not work and gave me the above error message.

Harry

[99jon]

Hi Harry

I’m finding the same problem. Only projects show up for me. I’m wondering if since the introduction of AI smart tags that all photos are regarded as tagged.

Do you have many photos without your own keywords?

[MichelBParis]

It works for me in PSE2019 as in previous versions?

Not sure if all smart tagging is complete.

[Greg_S.]

It is working for me too.  Just quickly browsing through the found untagged items, I see that many are video files that have not been keyword tagged by me.  None of the untagged photo files contain smart tags.  Given Somya's response, I'm assuming that files will not show up in the untagged category if they have a smart tag.

[minnbrit]

Let me ask my questions a different way

1. Regarding the error message. What is the applied filter?

2. Over the past couple of weeks I added new photos to Elements.

How do I determine which ones don't have a tag that I have applied?

I understand that "smart tags" are added by the system but I have my own tags on 4,670+ photos.

Remember: I started with Find > Untagged Items. - that's how I got the error message.

[99jon]

In older versions of PSE the command would find all photos without keywords. That has obviously changed as the link states:

All the media files in your catalog that don’t have any keyword tags, smart tags, people, places, or events assigned are displayed.

[99jon]

I've uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating how you can manually search for photos without keywords.

Find Organizer Photos Without Keywords - YouTube

[minnbrit]

Thanks for your suggestion but I feel that PSE needs to fix the problem. I conducted a small experiment.

• Preferences/Media-Analysis allowing smart tags.
• Imported a new photograph,
• Find/Untagged items
• Received the “ No media available. Please clear applied filter and try again”

• Preferences/Media-Analysis did not allow smart tags
• Imported a new photograph
• Find/Untagged items
• Found the photograph that I had just imported.

For me there are 2 possible solutions.

1. Fix what I see as a problem. Smart tags existed over previous releases and the Find/Untagged worked.
2. Show me how to delete all smart tags that already exist in the catalog

[mdjstevens]

Hi Folks,

I just upgraded to PSE19 last night. After I converted my 15,000 photo catalogue I did a quick missing keyword tag search. I discovered that I had over 300 photos that were not tagged. Ok, that's great. I will take the time over the next few weeks to start adding the missing tags (I have dozens of them that I like to apply to all of my photos). This is the process I have followed for years with many other version of PSE. Adding keyword tags can be time consuming for me so I do it when I have time using the Find, untagged items feature. OK, so what happened next. Two days later I went back to my catalogue to begin adding the missing keyword tags but to my horror, when I did the search only 3 files came up out of the previous 300 it found. So I did a bit of research and discovered that the reason was simple, PSE automatically added its own Smart tags to 98% of my photos so now I am unable to search for photos that are missing the special keyword tags that I apply. I depended heavily on that one FIND feature so that when I had time I could catch up on my tagging. Now what..... ? Clearly Adobe needs to fix this. The obvious solution would be for Adobe to add another FIND search filter such as "missing keyword tags" so that it ignores the smart tags. I rely heavily on being able to search for missing Keyword tags and considering I have over 15,000 photos in my collection, this is important to me. Please add a new Find search feature that gives us back the ability to search for missing keyword tags (not just smart tags).

[mdjstevens]

Just wanted to add that I apply the four tag categories to my photos, Keywords, People, Places and Events.

[mdjstevens]

Here is another thought as to why this new untagged item filter bug is a concerning problem for photographers… Let's say for example that I have my database of 19,000 photos and I know that I take the time to tag all of the photos with my 4 children by name (keyword name tag for each child). Let's say that at some point in my cataloguing I forget to tag a group of 100 photos from a couple of memorable times with my children. So now when I go to pull up my son's tag to see all of his photos I would never realize or know that I am missing 40 or 50 important photos because they would not have shown up. Now, when I go to use the <Find, untagged items> filter like I would have done in the past, even then those untagged photos of my son would still not show up. Why you ask.... because PSE had already applied smart tags to the photos so it thinks they are already tagged. Tagged yes by PSE with generic tags but not tagged by me with my kids names. In the past I would have caught the missing photos as I always checked the <Find, untagged items> filter on a regular basis but with the 2019 release I no longer get to see them. So hopefully you can begin to get the idea as to why this change is such a terrible thing for serious photographers with large collections and who spend a considerable amount of time tagging their photos.  

[mdjstevens]

Thanks for the video. I think your workaround solution is brilliant although I just want to caution anyone with a large catalogue like mine. I have approximately 19,000 photos in my catalogue and 30 plus keyword tag categories including places, people, events and keyword tags. I followed your instructions exactly and after 2.5 hours I am only at 12% complete (removing the tagged items from the untagged album). For anyone with smaller catalogues (under 5,000 items) then this solution should work fairly quickly but unfortunately it is not practical for me. Hoping for a new filter from Adobe.

[Greg_S.]

MichelBParis  wrote

It works for me in PSE2019 as in previous versions?

Not sure if all smart tagging is complete.

And it seems to work for me too.  However, I have added some further information in a related thread that may cast some further light on why that may be so.  In my use of the Find>Untagged Items search, the images with smart tags show up as "non match" items and are displayed in the grid. 

I agree with everyone else that this should be fixed. But in the meantime, I think Jon has provided a great workaround.

[mdjstevens]

If you want to know if the image was smart tagged just right click on the thumb nail and click remove smart tag. If there are smart tags showing in the list of tags that can be removed then you know the image was indeed smart tagged. I also just want to point out that Jon's workaround is only really practical for smaller catalogues. I attempted to do the work around last night on my 19,000 image catalogue but after 6 hours in it was still only 45% done so I cancelled the request. So keep that in mind for folks wanting to give it a go. So for me the only solution now is to manually check all of my images one by one for missing smart tags. If I start now and check 20 images a day it should only take me 950 days, lol.   Anyway, glad we all agree that a fix is needed.

[MichelBParis]

I suggest another way.

I have tested it with a 67 000 items catalog on a slow 6GB RAM on PSE2019. (Not up the the 8GB system requirements...)

It's reasonably fast, but there is a limitation: you can't have more than 10 master categories in the keywords section.

Take the time to create a saved search combining your main categorie with  AND operator

- Keyword tags contain category 1

- Keyword tags contain category 2

.....................................................

- Keyword tags contain category 10

Save that search under : "tagged"

Run it. A few seconds later you get all tagged items.

Select all

Add the new tag: "istagged" (just a little longer to tag all...)

Go back to all photos (< select all)

Search the keyword "istagged" in the keyword panel (tick the checkbox)

Right click on the checkbox and choose "Exclude from search".

The longer part is to create the saved search.

Before renewing the whole search, simply delete the temporary "istagged" tag.

I am curious to know if that works for you and how long it takes for you to do the whole process from the saved search (number of files in the library?)

Note: if like me you have a little more than 10 master categories, you'll have to save a second search for the additional categories and add the "istagged" tag.