Filtering by file size

Question

Hi,
I was *so* hoping that we'd finally be able to filter (or create a Smart Collection) based upon file size.
There are many reasons why this would be useful but the thing that trips me up every once in a while is that I'll forget to flatten my layers in Photoshop and the resulting tiff could be over 500 MB! Everyone once in a while I'll manually find the large files, flatten the layers, then re-import them into LR - in the specific case I mentioned the file was reduced to 17MB.
This seems like an obvious, useful, and easy to implement feature. Not sure why we don't have it yet...
Thanks!
RJ

Answer 1

In the Any Filter implementation, the incremental cost of an additional search criterion such as File Size is very small -- just a few lines of code.  I'd guess that the same would hold true for the LR implementation.
But there's a fairly long list of additional search criteria that are important to some number of LR users, including:  nested smart collections, virtual copies, stack size and position, file size, (cropped) megapixels, (cropped) width and height, numeric aspect ratio, explicit keywords, additional IPTC and IPTC extension fields,  GPS lat/long/altitude/distance, subject distance, all the develop settings.   I know that these are plausibly important from reading the forums and requests received from Any Filter users.  Even excluding the develop settings, Any Filter roughly doubles the number of criteria.
I think Adobe has tried to identify a small subset of search criteria that satisfies the great bulk of workflow needs.  Overall, I think they've been pretty successful at that.  But if they decided to add one or two of the criteria from the list above, they'd probably find themselves on a slippery slope, not being able to distinguish the priority of one criterion versus another (e.g. file size, numeric aspect ratio, megapixels, GPS distance).  
But if they add more than a couple of criteria, they'd face some non-trivial design and engineering issues:
- Should they index every additional criterion in the catalog database, to make the smart-collection searches instantaneous (as they do with the current criteria)?   Or would increasing the number of indexed criteria by 2x significantly slow down importing and incremental metadata editing?  Alternatively, should they document that some of the less-used criteria won't execute in smart collections "instantly", and then make that distinction clear to users somehow in the user interface? 
- With 2x the number of criteria, the current user-interface design becomes unwieldy.  In Any Filter, I was forced to introduce another level of drop-down menus, making it slower to access the most common criterion.   Adobe might think twice about that, not wanting to complicate the most common simple cases for the sake of lesser-used criteria.  Perhaps there's a better, much different interface design that can keep the more common cases simpler and fast, while still providing access to a larger set of criteria.