Negative search by caption - Organizer 2019

[birgitteh73505886]

I'm having trouble with the Elements Organizer 19 when I'm searching by captions…

I've tried using the search bar and "Find by caption or note/Search by metadata" but all I get is "No media available. Please clear the applied filter and try again."

In some cases the Organizer comes up with 2-3 results, but I've added the particular caption to roughly 25 images. I've added the same caption to several images using multiple caption adding by right-clicking on the selected images. It seems to me like the organizer isn't registering all of my captions but only a few.

Am I doing something wrong?

[MichelBParis]

You have two ways to search by caption:

- the Find menu

- the advanced search button on the top right of the display (magnifying glass)

They should both provide the same result.

The search by caption can find not only the full caption text, but also any word or part of a word.

So try to search by only a significant part of your caption.

There could be a few traps if some words include special characters like éà&àÉ...

[birgitteh73505886]

Thank you for your reply to my problem. Although those are the exact same methods I've already tried... And absolutely no results

Most of my captions are product names without special characters nor Æ, Ø or Å and are relatively short captions like "Berit", "Rose" or "Patina" - yet still no images shows when I search by caption.

[MichelBParis]

The only thing I can say ist that the search always works for me.

Maybe try to 'repair' the catalog? That can't hurt.

[birgitteh73505886]

I've also tried to run "repair" and "optimize" catalog  but all I get is this message:

Any experience fixing this?

[birgitteh73505886]

Also: If I add notes (same as caption) to my image it shows up when I use both "Find menu - search by caption/note" or search by using the magnifying glass. Seems to me that somehow my captions are not registered and correctly "attached" to the image(s)?

[MichelBParis]

The error message you get while trying to optimize is not good news. That may mean that your issue with the captions is just one of the symptoms of a corrupt catalog. I don't want to be too pessimistic because it seems you have been able to 'repair' without messages. There are two distinct steps when optimizing. The first one is mainly an automatic repair from the sqlite database to check the coherence between tables and indexes. The second one is to optimize the thumbnail cache. If the error message is shown in the second step, that's not a big deal. It's possible to recreate the thumbnails cache from scratch.

Could you do the following test:

Select a batch of random files and assign a new (temporary) caption.

Also assign a new keyword to retrieve the batch if the caption search fails.

Test the caption search.

If the search fails, re-select the batch and do an 'update thumbnails'.

Test again and report back.

The reason I suggest this is that the 'update thumbnail' command seems to have nothing to do with captions, but really, the effect is to read the caption stored in the metadata header of a file and to enter the caption into the catalog.

[birgitteh73505886]

I've tried it out but now the search causes my PSE to crash... When I try to do a search by using the magnifying glass, PSE crashes.

Using the find menu just leaves me with "no media available"