Ehancement: ability to compound smart Collection rules

Need a collection that is: Not rated & No stars & No color -OR- Not rated & No stars & Yellow.
Defaulting the "Match" dropdown to "all" and adding a new "+-" AND/OR dropdown would make the above logic possible. This would also make possible many more selection criteria.
I am aware that sometimes you can reverse all the criteria and achive the same result, but not always, and then it becomes difficult to make slight changes without redoing everything.

You can create nested boolean ANDs and ORs by holding down the Alt key and clicking the "#" button on the right (click on the image below to see at full resolution):
Clearly not an obvious user-interface design...

Similar Messages

Smart collection rules do not include smart collection itself

All my pictures are eventually set into collections. I also use smart collections to make sure I can retrieve items like MALLARD in a smart collection called DUCKS. So I created yet another smart collection NOT IN COLLECTIONS to make sure I did not oversee including recently imported pictures into a (set of) collection(s).
Unfortunately, the rules for smart collection do not include the smart collection ITSELF, so though MALLARD is in a (smart) collection by default, it also appears in NOT IN COLLECTIONS, which sort of defeat the purpose of assigning a picture to a collection automatically.
Any idea if this is a user error, a bug or should it be a request for a future improvement?
Windows XP SP3 LR 2.3

Not an error, neither a bug. It's by design.
You could post a feature request in the FR forum or the official Adobe wishlist.

How to define smart collection rules to match a folder's path?

I was hoping to define a tree of (smart) collections to match my folders tree, but coming up with a search criteria to match the folder path is proving difficult at best, impossible at worst.
Any ideas?

Hi John,
John R. Ellis wrote:
Perhaps the best you can do is
Folder contains words f1 f2 ... fn
where f1..fn are the elements of the path of the folder
Yes, that's exactly what I came up with, and for many folders it's correct, but for others - not so much...
Reminder: Using double spaces between words gets around the "big mallard ducks" (contains words) bug.
PS - I went ahead and purchased AnyFilter - I'll see what I can do with it :-)
Thanks,
Rob

Is it possible to define a smart collection rule that does not interpret a space as an implied 'OR'?

For example, I want the rule to trigger when the target contains "brown hair".
It should trigger when the target is "blue eyes, brown hair and ruby lips..." but *not* trigger when the target is "blonde hair and brown eyes".
Thanks,
Rob

Hi,
Can you check the "collection_of_record_type" you are using, because it works fine for me....plz make sure that table "Test" and the "collection_of_record_type" contains same number of attributes.
SBH

Smart Collection features I don't see in LR4 beta and wonder why not

I've been playing with the new LR4 beta for all of 10 minutes now, and am disappointed to see that Smart Collections haven't moved forward at all.
Things I'd hoped to see:
In the Edit Smart Collection window, why when you add a new rule does it always default to "Rating"? How is that the most likely thing I want? Sure, make it the default for the first rule, but thereafter, I think it would be a lot more useful if it added another rule of the type on the line you pressed '+' on. That is, if I have a "Keywords...Doesn't Contain" rule and press the '+' button on that line, there's a better chance that I want another such rule than that I want yet another "Rating" rule.
Continuing the previous, I think the second rule added should follow slightly different logic. If the default Rating rule wasn't changed to a different type, the default for the second rule shouldn't be "Rating" again to clone the first rule, but rather pick the second most likely rule type. Does Adobe have usage statistics for people's Smart Collections to draw on?
For Keywords rules, there aren't negative operators to match all of the positive operators. So we have Contains, and Doesn't Contain, but we have Contains All and lack Doesn't Contain Any, and we have Contains Words but not Doesn't Contain Words. You can get the desired effect by nesting the positive version in a "None of the following are true" sub-rule, but this feels clumsy. Either give us a symmetric set of logical operators, or take away the negatives and give a clean way to negate arbitrary rules without nesting rules when not needed.
Nested rule sets aren't discoverable. I stumbled across this feature by accident, and only then because I knew how to do the same in iTunes. I'd rather see a third button to the right of each rule line that gave a way to create a nesting than the current magic Option trick. One of the great things about Lightroom is how discoverable most things are; you scarcely need the manual. This is a sharp corner than needs to be knocked off.
There's still no way to refer to one Smart Collection from another! iTunes has had this since approximately forever. It is very useful to be able to extract common rule sets from multiple Smart Collections and simply refer to it from others. We call this the DRY Principle in programming, and it's a Good Thing.
No new Smart Collection rule types. At minimum, I'd hoped to see rules for megapixels and pixel dimensions. I'd like to be able to find all the pics with a long edge 640 pixels or less, for example. Megapixels is actually less useful, because it can be fooled by high aspect ratio images. A banner 4000 px wide and 100 px tall is "only" 0.4 Mpx, but it probably doesn't need to be any bigger. (Yes, I'm aware of Jeffrey Friedl's plugin. He wants this built into LR4, too. )
We don't even get one new rule having to do with geoencoding. Just off the top of my head, I'd kind of like to have a Smart Collection that found photos taken within 100 feet of my home's lat/long and didn't contain the keyword "home". I have many such Smart Collections in a Collection Set called "Warnings", each of which automatically checks my photos for something that I often forget.
You can't reorder rules or move them into or out of groups. I have Smart Collections with a dozen or so rules, and some with logic nested three levels. When assembling such complex little beasts, it isn't always clear while building it what logic order will give the desired result. You have to iterate, and that often means taking a perfectly good rule and moving it somewhere else. Lacking the ability to reorganize the existing rules, that means creating a new "Rating" rule, changing its type to match, cut-and-pasting the match criteria [if text] and deleting the old rule. Pfagh.
That's enough for now.

Ooops, found one new Smart Collection rule: "Metadata Status". One. Want more.

Smart Collection - can source be named Collection Set?

If I specify a smart collection rule that says the source must be a collection matching some pattern, does this only apply to actual collections and exclude collection sets?
I was hoping fo a way to build a rule based on the collection set ... is this possible?
I also tried matching Any Searchable Text set to the collection set name, but that doesn't seem to work...wouldn't all photos in the collection set be associated with that string? Looks like no.
-Colin
PS: There used to be a way I thought that you could submit a new thread after doing a question search. That seems to be gone. Or did I miss something?

CPChisholm wrote:
If I specify a smart collection rule that says the source must be a collection matching some pattern, does this only apply to actual collections and exclude collection sets?
If I remember correctly, yes.
John Ellis' AnyFilter lets you include collection set name (if I remember correctly).
Rob

Smart Collection bug with Title doesn't contain rule

Hi,
There are various articles on smart collections that check if the "Title" field is filled or not. Because the "Title" field doesn't have an "is empty" like function, the sugested solution is to use the rule:
Title   doesn't contain   a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z
But there is a bug in this rule. I found that the letter 't' is causing a problem. The letter 't' seems to include all characters.
Situation:
Four images that have a their Title field as follows:
Image 1:
Image 2: 2014-01 - Street Photography.dng
Image 3: 2014-01
Image 4: Some Image
(Image 1 has an empty title)
Four smart collections with the following rules:
Collection 1: Title   doesn't contain   a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z
Collection 2: Title   doesn't contain   0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Collection 3: Title   doesn't contain   a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,u,v,w,x,y,z
Collection 4: Title   doesn't contain   t
My expected result of the smart collections is:
Collection 1: Image 1 and Image 3
Collection 2: Image 1 and Image 4
Collection 3: Image 1 and Image 3
Collection 4: Image 1, Image 3 and Image 4
The actual result of the smart collections is:
Collection 1: Image 1
Collection 2: Image 1 and Image 4
Collection 3: Image 1 and Image 3
Collection 4: Image 1
I'm using Lightroom 5.7 on a MacBook Pro 17" (mid 2010), i7 @ 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM and 2 x 240GB SSD's running on OS X 10.10.1
My questions are:
Can anyone, specially from the Adobe Lightroom team, confirm this?
How to solve this issue?
With kind regards,
Dennis
www.idemi.nl

That is a bizarre bug. There is an even simpler way to reproduce the problem: Have two pics, one with title "a" and the other with title "t". The criterion "Title Contains a" correctly shows just the first picture, but the criterion "Title Contains t" shows both.
Searching with smart collections and filters has numerous bugs, but this one is by far the most surprising. As a geek programmer, I'd love to know what causes this!
Adobe rarely reads this forum -- I suggest you post this in the official Adobe feedback forum, which Adobe does faithfully read (but only infrequently responds).

What does the "collection" rule do in a Smart Collection?

It does not work as I expect, based on what the name suggests (I can't base my expectations based on any Adobe documentation since I can find none).
What I want to do is create a smart collection that includes all the photos in another (smart) collection.
Is this possible?
-Colin

Andrew Rodney wrote:
If you have one SC that works, I'm not clear why you want another that does the same thing.
I have many smart collections used for publishing which are replicated - Publish to Flickr, Smugmug, my iPad and my TV.
For me, it would be very useful to have the concept of a smart collection which mirrored and tracked the definition of another.
ideally for more flexibity it would be good if one smart collection could "inherit" and follow the properties of another as well as potentially add more refinement logic.
Just my view and the way I work.
Alan.

I would like to see a "user order" sort option for Smart Collections

I use LR to set up Collections to use for web output and typically use key wording to organize which photos will be included in any web gallery. Right now I have to make that into a regular collection so I can rearrange the collection to appear the way I want to present things. I would prefer to be able to utilize Smart Collections so any photos I want to add will be included automatically when I set up the proper keywords. New additions should be at the end of the current order and the user should be able to move that around in the presentation order as desired.

I absolutely agree. I used a similar function in Aperature all the time. It was the main reason I originally chose Aperature over LightRoom till Lightroom came out with the latest edition that included Smart Collections, and was I disappointed to find that it wasn't as powerful as Aperature's Smart Folders options.
Both programs have their strengths and their weaknesses... and this time around I think Lightroom has the advantage, but Aperature still wins on Smart Collections customization ability and power.

Learning Filtering: Smart Collections doesn't show all filtered images

I'm studying using Classroom In A Book so this test is small and only using the few images provided on the CIAB CD.
It says in the book that a Smart Collection is a selection filtered according to whatever rules you specify.
This is fine, but when I click the down arrow to the left side of the screen to see the listings under Smart Collections only some of the filtered images are shown. Images that I marked with red are shown as a Smart Collection. Images that I marked with Green (only one) does not show. A single image that I marked with five stars shows up as a Smart Collection, so it can't be that you need more than one item marked before it shows up as a Smart Collection. I made sure that I have highlighted the folder that contains the images (made it local) and that they are displayed in Library Mode and in Grid View.
What might cause some of the images I have applied filter attributes to not to show up in Smart Collections?
TIA,
Ken

dorin_nicolaescu wrote:
Images that I marked with red are shown as a Smart Collection. Images that I marked with Green (only one) does not show. A single image that I marked with five stars shows up as a Smart Collection
What does the book say? It says "a Smart Collection is a selection filtered according to whatever rules you specify." It means the rules you specify for you r smart collection. These are default "canned" lightroom collections. The first happens to have the rule "show labelled with red", the second — "show 5-star images". Images tha match the rules defined in a SC - are displayed in that SC.
Double-click any smart collection to see its rules.
To create a new smart collection with your own rules, click Library>New Smart Collection.
The Smart Collections I have were created without me double-clicking on anything. The book just told me to try out some of the ways to mark images and to try out each way. All of a sudden, Smart Collections appeared with some of the marked images. I was just wondering why it stopped at some but did not do them all? Also, what if I don't want Smart Collections at this point? How do I turn it off from making arbitrary Smart Collections without my prompting?
Don't get me wrong dorin_nicolaescu, I am a beginner and know nothing. You sound like you have a good grip on what Smart Collections are and how they work. What you have writtenis helpful, especially the part about "To create a new smart collection with your own rules, click Library>New Smart Collection."
I am still in a Fog about why Smart Collections starts collections on its own.

Smart Collections By Label Name

Since we have the ability to have multiple label sets, I think it would be better if we could use label names to create smart collections instead of just label colors.

Works for me. I use it to have Smart Collections of my SmugMug Galleries. Do 'Label Text' 'Contains'
. In the image Metadata fill in Label under Rating. I have scads of them and use Collection Sets to emulate the online hierarchy.
Don

How can I extract parts of the EXIF metadata to use in a Smart Collection?

I want to aggregate all of the images I've captured by Capture Month and identify those images that were scanned or have no Capture Date. This question actually attempts to open the door for read access to all of the image metadata and the ability to store some of it in user-identified fields which, somehow, the user will be able to populate.
So - if the date fields (i.e. DateTime Original, DateTime Captured, DateTime Modified ) were broken down into, for example using DateTime Original: Original Year-YYYY, Original Month-MM, Original Day-DD. It may be possible to do this with a redefination of the schema used to define each of the fields. That would be the simpliest, easiest way - if that's possible.
If it isn't possible (or not in the near future, anyway) does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks

With over 45 years in IT (I know, it only means I'm an old man - not that I learned anything ), I observed that many of the problems I identified had simple solutions. The reason they weren't in the original releases was, the testers felt "Why would someone want to do that? Or need that data? Or that field?" Why would you hold an iPhone quite like THAT?
Since Adobe defined the schema that captures the image metadata and defined what fields would be accessable and in what way; the most direct solution to this is to modify the schema through a redefinition of the date fields — all of them — so the individual elements are accessable.
Also, because one of Lightroom's key features is image management, these new data fields should be accessible for Smart Collections. There's at least one other person in this community who's interested in a By Month Across Year sort and I suspect many people don't speak up, even if they have a similar need.
That's what I meant. While outside developers (non-Adobe employees) might be able to come up with a patch for the solution, the underlying problem will still remain until Adobe acts. Solving the problem is the less expensive means of dealing with the issue.
I think.

Update to process version 2010 & smart collection "has adjustments"

Buying the new Lightroom 3 version ofcourse I wanted to profit of the new process version. So I selected all images I had "not adjusted" before and selected Update to Process version 2010. This works great.
However I now have one problem.
I had and have a Smart collection which helps me in my workflow to find all images that have not been touched, so have no adjustments.
This Smart collection has become worthless because of the update to process version 2010 all images have been adjusted.
Ok, this is correct and yet I miss my ability to select images which I have not adjusted.
Once I have set the default process version to 2010 all new images are correctly shown.
Question: how can I select all those images which have only the process version updated, but have no further adjustments?

Changing the process to version 2010 is considered as an adjustment; it will appear in the photo's history in the same way as any other development adjustment. The smart filter condition "Has Adjustments" only has a true or false setting so you can't distinguish the process version adjustment from any other. Instead of using this method to spot the photos I need to work on, I find that I have more control over my workflow by using keywords such as "review", "develop", "print"; you can make these keywords not exportable so that they are not part of the keyword list in exported photos.
Interestingly, when one or more photos are selected in the film strip and the reset button is clicked in develop mode the photo will revert back to its original state, the "Has Adjustments" condition will become false, but the process version will remain at 2010.
If you have a backup of your catalog that precedes the step where you updated the process version of all photos, open this backup, add a keyword of your choice to all the photos that have not been touched, then apply the process version change. You can then change your smart catalog to use this keyword as opposed to the "Has Adjustment" condition and remove the keyword you have set on photos that have not been touched as soon as you are done editing them. IMPORTANT: Any changes you have made following the date and time of the backup will be lost.
If you don't have a backup to go to, you will have to manually identify which photos, which from your point of view, have not been touched.
Some ideas:
If you did not make other edits following the change of the process version, and have not made other edits on that date, you could built a smart collection based on the 'Edit Date" and then reset the develop settings of all the photos in that collection.
Another possible condition is a "Capture Date" range where you know photos haven't been touched yet.
There may be other options, there may be a plugin that can help you, or ultimately there would be means to access the database outside of Lightroom - contact me if you get that desperate to fix this!
http://www.BDLImagery.com

Smart collection with last X photos imported

I'm trying to create a smart collection that contains the last X (say 1000) photos taken/imported. Not sure what rules to use, can someone give me some pointers.
Thanks

For Imported...
Not elegant at all but can be done in a few seconds.
You can go to All Photos in Grid mode and set the Sort to Added Order. Set your grid to 10 Wide and your sort order to Z-A. Grab the first however many rows of 10 you want and transfer them to a Quick Collection.

Smart Collection collecting too many keywords

I created a smart collection with only one rule - Keywords/Contains/'Landscape' - but many other images that do not contain that keyword appear in the collection. It doesn't happen with any other keyword as far as I know. I tried re-creating the collection, re-keywording my images, etc. but with no success. How can I fix this problem?

Darbs,
I suspect that Landscape is a parent keyword for several others. Look in your keyword list to see if that's the case.
Alternatively, you could set the Keyword Tags entry to "Keywords & containing keywords" to see what's going on:
Hal

Ehancement: ability to compound smart Collection rules

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