finding certain untagged photos

[WKKruske]

Hi Friends,

PSE 2020 w/PC.  I almost always tag all of my photos with a certain tag (year).  It seems I failed to do so on 50 or so.  The photos also contain other tags (person name, activity, special events, etc).  Is there a way to find these 50 or so photos that do not contain the date tag?  I do "save metadata to files".

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[Greg_S.]

I don't know of an easy way to perform that search.  How do you know that there are about 50 files that meet this criterion?  If, for example, you failed to tag the date on a particular folder or set of scans, you could sort the grid by Batch Order and perhaps find the files that way.  Or if you scanned the files in a particular date range and did not change the display date, you could scroll through the grid in date order to find the date of the scan.

I assume that you are talking about scanned photos because there should be no need to tag camera or device images with a date.  If you have some other purpose or workflow, let us know.

[WKKruske]

Thanks for your response Greg.  You are correct about scanning in photos.  A number of years ago, I added about 15K of negatives and slides.  Of course, there was no metadata attached to those scans, so I had to add at least the date information as a tag, along with other pertinent information.   Even now, I add the year as a tag to new digital photos to aid in finding photos in the organizer.  So, how do I know there are 50 photos with no "year" tag?  When I open organizer and select "all media", PSE shows how many photos are in the catalog, in my case 19,301.  I then select the keyword "year" in the tag/information panel, all the sub-categories are selected too, and PSE shows 19,251.  Considering I have over 300 folders that feed PSE, I don't think going through each folder would be timely.  I have found a freeware program that allows me to select "all photos" in File Explorer in Windows and download that file, and the exposed tag contents to a CVS file.  Through a series of sorts and "text to columns" exercises in Excel, I might be able to find the missing photos, but I have found it to be inconsistent in its results.  You get what you pay for!  Thanks for your comments!

[Greg_S.]

OK.    I think I have an easy solution for you.

• Click on the Year tag to select all photos with that tag
• Under Options, select Show results that do not match

[WKKruske]

While promising, that feature does not reveal any useful results.  I select the "year" tag, and PSE shows 19,251.  I then select "show results that do not match" and PSE shows 19,301, the size of the entire catalog.  I tested it on other tags and the results are the same.  It always shows the entire catalog.  Hmm.

[Greg_S.]

It works for me.  Can you show us a screenshot of your tag hierarchy with the Year tag showing.  And also show a screenshot of the Options dialog.  The photos without the Year tag will have a prohibition icon in the top left corner of the thumbnail.

[WKKruske]

I see that icon now.  I wasn't sure what to look for.  I rather expected to see just the photos that were missing the tag to just show up. Now I know!  But the bottom line is, I still have to drill through 19K of thumbnails to find them.  Guess I have my work cut out for me!  Thanks for your help!

[Greg_S.]

You shouldn't have to drill through the files to find them.  Perhaps I have misunderstood how you have tagged the year - which is why I asked for a screenshot of your tag hierarchy.

If you don't use Albums, there would be another way to find the untagged year images.

[WKKruske]

OK, here's a couple of screen shots.  The first is an un-expanded view showing all the categories The second one shows a partially expanded shot of the "year" tag (actually it's a sub-category).   Actually, all the sub-categories were once tags, but I couldn't  get them to alphabetize, so I changed them.

[Greg_S. · Accepted solution]

I now realize that the Options panel is very confusing.   The two choices shown in my earlier screenshot are actually the reverse of what needs to be displayed.  The two options are toggles.  If you click on them and end up with the setting on the right in the following screenshot, you should end up with only the untagged Year images displayed.

[WKKruske]

Greg,  You are a genius!  I would have never guessed it was a two-step process.  I hope Adobe is monitoring this forum and learning from their subscribers.  And making their software more intuitive!

Thanks so much!