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34

P: Boolean Search

Community Beginner ,
Mar 03, 2019 Mar 03, 2019

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E.g. negating search parameters such as a certain person is NOT found in these pictures

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macOS , Windows

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32 Comments
Mentor ,
Mar 03, 2019 Mar 03, 2019

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what?

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 03, 2019 Mar 03, 2019

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This is „Lightroom CC for Mobile devices“ on iOS iPad. Current filter parameters let you show pictures that include a certain keyword, person were taken from a certain camera. I want to reverse this, i.e. show me all pictures that do not contain the tag „spring“. Or all the pics where a certain person is not present. Or even all pictures that do not have any tag / keyword

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Explorer ,
Mar 04, 2019 Mar 04, 2019

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That would be really helpful for me too!

Filtering out photos that are NOT assigned to an album "X", for example. Or Photos that do NOT have a certain keyword added to them. Of displaying photos that were NOT shot with an iPhone.

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Engaged ,
Mar 04, 2019 Mar 04, 2019

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All pictures not taken by a Nikon... for example ;-)

Also a bug in the search option: it does not search in the folders name. Very stupid, imho 😛

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Mentor ,
Mar 04, 2019 Mar 04, 2019

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good idea. thanks for clarifying.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 04, 2019 Mar 04, 2019

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Hi Armen, Steffan, Antoine

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would like to further understand what kind of workflow you are looking at where this feature will be useful? More specifically, what would you like to do with photos that don't contain the tag "spring", NOT shot on "iPhone", NOT having a certain person, etc.?

~Ankur

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Explorer ,
Mar 04, 2019 Mar 04, 2019

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Hi Ankur!

It's a logical way to track photos that were submitted to stock sites. I currently tag these photos with "Stock" keyword when culling or have time to dive into old photos of mine. Later, when I'm at a computer and plan to submit a pack of new photos I search for the keyword and export them. Having an ability to search for "not" gives two advantages. I can filter out photos that already have "Stock" keyword applied to them, so I only look at photos that are not yet 'reviewed'. Second, by having a "Submitted" tag I can filter out photos that were not yet submitted. The same logic applies when submitting to Instagram and other sites. Simply put, you can quickly browse only unpublished photos.

Another, much more personal use case, we use AppleTV as our main media device at home, and it's quite convenient when you make your screensaver to use Lightroom album, that LR automatically generates when you export photos to iOS photos. The problem is tracking photos that you already have exported. So Again, the easiest way currently is tagging (or having them in an Album, it does not matter) "AppleTV", that way I know which photos are on the screensaver, but this information is not as important, as knowing which photos are still not there. So searching for "Not AppleTV" or similar would list all photos that are not tagged, and you choose new photos to export by tagging or adding them to the album.

In a perfect world these modular searches could be saved as smart albums, in reality they would be just saved search tags. So when you click on them, you get the results.



If there are better ways to manage those kinds of situations with current tools, I'm all ears 🙂

P.S. 
The latest feature "Not in (any) Album" is a very strange implementation, to be honest 🙂 I highly doubt that that many people have ALL of their photos assigned to an album or strive to it. 



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Community Beginner ,
Mar 05, 2019 Mar 05, 2019

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Hi Armen

Thanks for the insights. It helps us understand the workflows better which are crucial in designing the features. In the meantime, the only option I can think of is using flags/ratings in some permutation (unless they are already being used in some other capacity).

Can you elaborate on why the "Not in any album" seem strange? This was a highly requested (link here). My take on the most common usage is that people want to assign the photos to atleast one album. This filter will help them find such orphan photos easily and assign them to the relevant albums. Is there something additional you would like this feature to handle?

-Ankur

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 05, 2019 Mar 05, 2019

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Hi,
pretty much the same flow as Armen described above for exports of all sorts. And some more:
- When tagging my pictures, I sometimes get distracted. Would be helpful to filter only those where no tag is assigned yet
- Face recognition: I still tag people on my pictures as long as face recognition is not 100% reliable. So I select all pics where person Steffen is present and tag them with "steffen". Then I like to see all pics where Steffen is not present (or tag "steffen" is not assigned) to review and tag the missed ones.
Steffen

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Engaged ,
Mar 05, 2019 Mar 05, 2019

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In general, why not implement all the Boolean operation and brackets in the filters: AND,OR,XOR, ...
This would be the most precise way to search!
And this does not need to complicate the search function, just make LR understand this language. Google does it great, eBay, ...

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LEGEND ,
Jul 01, 2019 Jul 01, 2019

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Searching for two keywords results in an 'AND' operation, but searching for two People is an 'OR' operation. This seems inconsistent.

More importantly, there seems to be no way to search for photos containing "Both Andrew and Emily" (set intersection), nor any way to search for photos containing "Andrew but not Emily" (set subtraction).

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LEGEND ,
Oct 06, 2019 Oct 06, 2019

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Or just implement like Apple Photos do it nowadays with "macOS Photos Smart Albums". Very smart! With this you will cover quite all

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LEGEND ,
Oct 06, 2019 Oct 06, 2019

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This is really a missing feature!

ps: "not in any album" is a must have, thank you for that. But it's hidden somehow for some users

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LEGEND ,
Oct 06, 2019 Oct 06, 2019

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Implementation like macOS does it with "Smart Folders" or Apple Photos "Smart Albums" would be a game changer - really!


Waiting for it.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 22, 2019 Oct 22, 2019

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Negative boolean operators would be useful for me for all the reasons Steffen and Armen have already laid out

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LEGEND ,
Feb 07, 2020 Feb 07, 2020

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This is a terrible loss of functionality to not have these basic search criteria included. This seems more a bug than a process enhancement as this is basic programming

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Explorer ,
Nov 22, 2021 Nov 22, 2021

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Image search with boolean operaters would be a welcome feature.

Althougt cloud search is very efficient, the possibility to exclude some photos (NOT operator) to narrow the search results may help to speed up the process. 

Beside that, boolean operators are useful for keywording maintainance and bettering, so to improuve search experience.

Please consider this possibility in future Lr developments.

Thanks. 

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Explorer ,
Dec 06, 2022 Dec 06, 2022

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Lightroom CC is a great product with a very high potential (Desktop PC and iPad), however at this stage, there are still a few critical features missing. I'm surprised why it takes so long to include these basics:

1.It still needs a powerful SEARCH function. If you pay a subscription for Lightroom CC, it's because you have many photos. So the Search function is the basic essential. Being able to search with AND / OR / NOT is a real must-have. If you're looking for photos of one person AND his dog, you need to be able to include AND. Same thing if you're looking for several people together, or several people in a specific place, or with a specific tag. The search function needs to work for Persons, also in the people's tab (currently disabled). Currently, we can only search with OR.

2.The second critical feature missing in Lightroom CC is DYNAMIC / SMART ALBUMS (like the dynamic playlists in iTunes): You create an album with several criteria, like keywords, people, or location (also using And/Or/Not). And the folder gets updated automatically when new photos are added to Lightroom, or new keywords are added to a photo. So you don't need to add the photos to the album or folder manually. In effect, the album would be a bit like a detailed saved search. Examples: your family, a group of friends, a specific location where you come back regularly, a specific topic you like (Sports with certain people)....

3.PERSONS: How can you add someone’s face in a picture, who was not recognised ? Assign People tags to pictures that were missed is essential: Once the indexing has been completed and Lightroom CC has found all the potential faces, it is critical to have the ability to add People Tags to pictures that were "missed" where no faces were recognised. You will never be able to prevent: the algorithm will never be able to recognise 100% of appearances for one person. There will always be many reasons for someone even in the middle of a sharp picture, which the algorithm cannot recognise: because it's a child with a tiger face mask, because the person is turning his back on the picture (and you still want to keep that picture), because he has swimming pool glasses on, because he's swimming and covered with water - because he's too far (and small) on the picture, because his head is upside-down on the picture - and so on.... For all these reasons, it is absolutely critical to:  (i) be able to manually add one person / face to a photo, even if Lightoom has missed someone on the picture. Currently, you can add a tag with a name (but not a person), then you have 2 tags in LR for that person: 1 keyword + 1 person's tag. This is really suboptimal for searches. (ii) also, currently, using LR on the PC, the software shows you the people already recognised on the picture. So you know if someone is missing or not. However on the ipad, this is crucially missing.

4.BULK EDIT: How can you rename the filenames in bulk for many pictures at the same time ? (like you do in Photoshop Elements, also like EOS utility, adding the date & author name). When you import photos directly from the camera to the Ipad, you basically skip the step of EOS Utility (or equivalent), which renames properly all the imported files, and also adds the copyright in the raw file. For the direct import to iPad's Lightroom to work well, it needs to do bulk edit.  The issue goes to the point that when you export to Jpeg, if you want to customise, you cannot include the capture date. Even EOS Utility does better…

5.IPAD: quite a few features from the desktop version are not available in the iPad yet: (i) recognise faces in the Tag tab, select several pictures and add the same Tag, same legend, (ii) pile 2 pictures together, (iii) merge pictures together into a panoramic one, (iv) view GPS location details.

6.A MAP VIEW of the pictures is another must-have, like the iOS map view of photos. And you need to be able to add a location for all the places where the camera had not recorded it. There will always be some. And it will create issues with the Search function, until we can add manually the location.

7.Photo show : could you please add a feature to see them in random order ?

8.Add photos by selecting several Albums at the same time (currently you can select only one album at a time)

9.Black&White: taking photos in raw, they’re all in colour to start with. Then with LR, we can create a B&W version without losing the colour version. That’s great. However, i cannot put a B&W tag to a version picture. How can i search and see all my B&W together, next to each other ?

10.In the Desktop PC, how do you copy several pictures together to paste them in a Windows folder outside Lightroom ?

11.How do you transfer thousands of pictures (in Raw) to your children for them to keep all the work done: stars, faces recognised, tags, versions, photo settings…

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New Here ,
Dec 07, 2022 Dec 07, 2022

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I second all of the comments here. I'm paying more for Lightroom than I would any other photo management service, and it still does not have feature parity with Google Photos and Apple Photos. Improvements to search and people view is top priority in my opinion.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 07, 2022 Dec 07, 2022

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You should read this post: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/how-do-i-write-a-feature-request/idi-p/123863...

 

In particular, note the sentence in red about one feature request per thread.

 

To save you reposting all of your requests into 11 individual "ideas", be aware that many of them already exist in the system, so finding them and adding your votes (and any supporting comments) would likely be a more productive use of your time.

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Explorer ,
Dec 07, 2022 Dec 07, 2022

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I believe i alreay did this two years ago, with zero impact since then. I do not have all that the time to spend on feedback 1 by 1, for a software which is very expensive. 
Doing the detailed list above is already quite a job

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 23, 2022 Dec 23, 2022

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Dear Adobe,

 

Now when you search for keywords, Lightroom CC automatically uses the "OR" operator and displays all images with one of the keywords used.

 

Can you please make this optional and create an "AND" and "OR" option in the search bar so you can use the "AND" operator to display only images that have all the added keywords in the search bar to narrow down your selection.

 

Many thanks!

Alex Pansier

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New Here ,
Dec 23, 2022 Dec 23, 2022

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--
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Community Beginner ,
Dec 30, 2022 Dec 30, 2022

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A boolean search feature would be really useful for me too. I like to take pictures for various reasons - as a hobby, for work, for memories etc. I like to categorise them into albums like sceneries, work, art references etc. Sometimes I use the photos in sceneries as references, so I want to view both the art refernces and sceneries together (like "in references or in sceneries") to choose the perfect fit. Also, as mentioned before, a not feature is really important to review the photos not already in an album.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 30, 2022 Dec 30, 2022

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quote

Also, as mentioned before, a not feature is really important to review the photos not already in an album.

 

There's a "Not in any Album" dedicated search feature in the Lightroom desktop app, has been there for a couple of years. To use, click on All Photos then click in the Search bar. That brings up a list of all the searchable "facets", click on the "Album" facet, the list of albums appears.....then scroll to the bottom of the list and click on the "Not in Any Album" entry that you will find there. An even quicker way would be to start typing "not in any album" directly into the search bar and after a few letters have been typed the "Not in Any Album" entry appears below, click on it to execute.

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