Smart Collection matching a multi-word Keyword

I have the following multi-word keywords:
"through the years"
"kelly through the years"
"mike through the years"
I want to create a smart collection which only matches if the keyword is "through the years". I do not want the smart collection to match the other two.
Is this possible?

I agree that this is a design oversight that should be corrected. However, one could argue that a keyword entirely contained in another should be represented by a hierarchy. While the OP does not make it clear what the relationship is between "through the years" alone and "kelly through the years" it would seem that the concept of "kelly through the years" would be better represented with keyword beneath "through the years" and as such would not need to contain the string "through the years".
Also the OP states that the keyword "Kelly" exists on it's own and is distinct from "kelly through the years". It is not clear to me why just the keywords "through the years" and "Kelly" could not exist as flat keyword (no hierarchy). To achieve the concept of "kelly through the years" you would apply both. Then a simple AND condition would find the desired images.
In short I think this is a case of a flawed keyword hierarchy.
Again I agree that an exact match option should be provided.
-Josh

Similar Messages

In Keyword List panel, need to support quotes for AND'ing multi-word keyword searches

As far as I know (and read around), there's no way to search multi-word keywords in the keywords list panel using the "Filter Keywords" box. i.e. If I want to search for the "Great Blue Heron" keyword in a large animal keywords list I have, Lightroom will OR the three words instead of AND'ing them like Aperture does more intuitively. Adding quotes like "Great Blue Heron" doesn't work either. Again this is to filter a large keyword lists through the "Filter Keywords" box in the Keywords List panel.
Am I missing something? Is it possible to AND multi-word keywords?
Thanks.

Rob,
as far as I know spaces are also contained and allowed in controlled vocabularies (e.g. for the "official" names of animals 'little panda' for example and plants). I'm using spaces for names very often. As a prof. photographer I need to write captions for all of my images before sending them to my agency with WHEN/WHAT/WHERE/WHO etc. So when shooting persons very often or regular (e.g. politicians or athletes) I started years ago to create keywords and hierarchies for them. So it is much easier and more comfortable to assign them later.
Please check out PhotoMechanic or IMatch. These progs doesn't have any problems with spaces in keywords and keyword searches...
BTW: when using a space in a search I expect that the default behaviour of such a space is a locical AND.
Lars

How to Create a Multi Word Keyword

How do you join a multi-word keyword so it is recognized as one keyword? i.e. If you want "New York", not "New" and "York." Do you put it in quotes? Isolate it with commas? Other?
Ocean View
Ocean Front
Over the Water
I try to do this in Library Mode, Keyword Creation box, I get 2 words.
Example, I type Los Angeles and get: Angeles, Los
Nothing I try works. I know it is common since I imported 200,000 images and I see lots of word combos used as keywords.
I read the manual, looked at tutorials, read an existing thread on this, can't find the simple answer.
I am about to start keywording my 200,000 images from the last 12 years, I need to learn this at the get go...
How to friends?
Dale Dreher
Los Angeles
[email protected]

In my experience, the keyword entry boxes (for adding keywords), properly treat spaces as data.
You may need to adjust your preferences (Interface tab):
When searching for said keywords after entry: not so much - Lr treats spaces as delimiter, not data - not as part of the search term...
I use SpaceUrchin, some people use AnyFilter, for finding metadata with spaces in it.

How Separate Keywords? How Join Multi-Word Keywords?

1. How are Keywords required to be separated? Is a space sufficient or is a comma or something else required?
2. How do you join a multi-word keyword so it is recognized as one keyword? i.e. If you want "New York", not "New" and "York." Do you put it in quotes? Isolate it with commas? Other?

Yes, "New York" should come through as one Keyword. ( At least "Grand Canyon" does on mine.)
The "user manual": My mistake, I should have written "User Guide". Oops!
It is essentially the same as the help you get from the Menu>Help>Lightroom Help.
But it is a .PDF guide that I find easier to navigate and can bookmark.
You should have gotten a copy with your Lightroom Download but you can download another copy with Menu>Help>Help Resources Online and click on the PDF link.
Best of Luck
N

Using multi-word keywords in "Find"

Let's say I have a keyword: "Downtown LA", and another keyword, "Downtown SLC". If I use the Lightroom "Find" option to search for "Downtown LA", it will actually find any images with "Downtown" as part of its keywording, including the "Downtown SLC" images.
I tried wrapping the keyword phrase in quotes to see if that would give me an exact phrase search, but it doesn't work that way apparently. I know I could drop down to the keyword browser, but let's say I'm looking for all images with both the "Downtown LA" keyword, AND the "Family Vacation" keyword. How would I search for such an intersection when the "find" menu locks in on individual words rather than the entire keyword phrase?

>You might want to check out the Keyboard Shortcuts and Search Rules document in the FAQ on this forum. There is a section which contains all the search arguments which allow you to do some pretty fancy stuff, including finding just "Salt Lake City"
I have a copy of that...it doesn't work.
Text: Keywords
Rule: Contains All
Text Field: Black Canyon
What I expect are photos with a keyword containing "black" and "canyon".
What I get are any photo with a keyword or any of its parents containing "black" and a keyword or any of its parents containing "canyon".
So, in addition to photos of Black Canyon Dam and photos taken in Back Canyon I also get photos of Black Birds taken in Canyon County.
This can be "fixed" by changing "Black birds" to "Blackbirds" and surrounding "Black" in the text field with plus signs...this is silly.
The space character is a ligitimate keyword character and ought to be treat as such if it does not appear at the beginning or end of a keyword.
The keyword entry panel uses commas as delimiters. Why are spaces used as delimiters in the Find panel?
How about the same delimiter (a comma) everywhere?
Winston Mitchell
Boise, Idaho

Smart Collection Criteria (keywords)

I'm just starting to create some Smart Collections, which is a nice feature that I'm trying to understand. I've read some of the tips and tricks, but I'm trying to figure out something:
I want to create a smart collection that has a particular keyword, but no other keywords. For example, I may have a bunch of photos with several different keywords, but I want to single out one keyword for the smart collection. I don't just want photos with that keyword, but photos with ONLY that keyword. I see you can specify "contains", "contains all", "contains words", "doesn't contain" - but nothing that specifies "contains ONLY".
So let's say I tag my photos with the names of my kids (we have three of them). I want to single out photos of just my son, Brandon. If I do the "contains" criteria, it's going to give me all of the Brandon photos, but also the photos with my other kids in the pictures as well. I don't see a way to specify that I ONLY want photos with the keyword "Brandon" and no other keywords in the photos.
Is there a way to do this? Or am I just not thinking clearly? ;-)

You can specify "Brandon", "but not Jason" "but not Susie."- that'd be all right for your kids, but I have almost no photos with just one keyword. I'd usually have setting or holiday or vacation or something else besides my kid's names in any event.

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

Duplicate Published Smart Collection error

I have Lightroom 6.01. The Duplicate Published Smart Collection feature does not work. Whenever I right click on a Published Smart Collection to invoke the Duplicate... command, I get an error message each time I attempt to do this. The error message says "An internal error has occurred. Assertion failed."

mrhoni wrote:
It says I have to manually reapply when images change.
Right - it computes filtered images on demand, instead of attempting to keep up-to-date. But, you can narrow down the search using "Keywords Contains Dogs", then use AnyFilter to refine the results (check "Visible photos only") - much faster that way.
Note: consider SpaceUrchin too - tricky to learn syntax, but allows you to refine Lr's searches by simply typing into Lr's search box, and searches can be saved as ordinary lib filters. For example, if you have SpaceUrchin installed, then typing:
(Keywords Contain)
Dogs | text=Dogs | stop=4
will narrow the keyword search from all those with "Dogs" to only those with "Dogs" in the first 4 characters. Save lib filter preset for next time...
mrhoni wrote:
I would think it would only select the Smugmug Published Collection "Dogs" and not the Collection "Our Dogs" because while "Our Dogs" does end with "Dogs" it does not start with "Dogs".
You would think wrongly in this case. Lightroom divides the search target into tokens, governed by spaces, then does the same to the search term, then applies each search token to each target token, in turn.
Thus "Our Dogs" (when so tokenized) becomes
1. Our
2. Dogs
in the eyes of Lightroom's searcher.
Given that, "Our Dogs" does have a token that begins with "Dogs", thus it is considered a match.
PS - If it's any consolation, I don't like the way Lightroom treats spaces in metadata and search terms either. But, I realized this long ago, and converted all multi-word keywords to single-word, so the only problem I have is with non-keyword metadata, and for that I usually use SpaceUrchin, and sometimes AnyFilter.
Maybe one day I will create a plugin which replicates all metadata fields without spaces, so searching can be done the way many of us wants (using Lr native search facilities). Until then... - good luck.
Rob

Bridge Smart Collection Error

I am running Bridge on a Mac and am having an issue in creating smart collections. My image files keyworded in metadata. When I attempt to create a Smart Collection by searching in a folder by the keyword (for example) tree, the smart collection does not find all the images with the keyword tree. I am including all subfolders and non indexed files in the search. Any help would be appreciated.

I am having the same issue with the Find (Cmd+F) function.
Do you mean the find function in Bridge or using Finder?
To search for files with a certain keyword you best use the find command in Bridge. Besides having included subfolders and non indexed file make sure your source is the main folder where all the subfolders and files you are looking for are saved.
Also check the criteria settings. For keywords best choose the keywords in the first field and 'contains ' in the second field, use the plus sign to add an other keyword to the list if you want to search for multiple keywords
Under results set Match to if any criteria are met. If you have set this to if all criteria are met it only shows the files containing all the searched keywords which also can narrow the search down.
And check if you have read and write permission for the disk the files are on.

Smart Collection Help

Do you know why my smart collection is not working? There are 10 videos in this collection.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to achieve but it seems to me that you are trying to describe your smart collection by setting parameters for the collection itself. That doesn't work.
When you describe the parameters for a collection you have to think of the parameters that should be pulled into the collection.
So, for instance, you want all images that you took at Christmas in a smart collection.
You then have to find a parameter that exists already independent of the collection and would pull all images into this collection. These parameters can be keywords, file names folder names, etc.
For instance you tag all images taken at Christmas with the keyword "X-mas". Then you would specify the smart collection as "Keyword - contains - X-mas".
Or you put all images taken at Christmas into a specific folder and the folder name is "X-mas", then you would specify your smart collection with "Folder - contains words - X-mas".
Or you could say "capture date - is in the last - 1 month.
And, naturally, you can specify more than one parameter.

Smart Collection gymnastics

Who finds Smart Collections to behave in a most peculiar fashion? They certainly do when dealing with collections.
If I create a Smart Collection with attributes: "Match all; Collection contains all Jewellery brochure; Rating is 5 stars", then I find the smart collection contains all 5 star images from the "Jewellery brochure" collection. This is expected behaviour.
Now I edit the smart collection: "Match all; Collection contains all Jewellery brochure; Pick Flag is flagged" and expect all flagged images in the "Jewellery brochure" collection to be in the smart collection. Instead, no images appear in the smart collection. This is unexpected behaviour.
It gets weirder. I edit the smart collection: "Match all; Collection contains all Jewellery brochure; Pick Flag is unflagged" and expect only unflagged images in the "Jewellery brochure" collection to be in the smart collection. Instead, all images appear in the smart collection, even those flagged or rejected in the "Jewellery brochure" collection. Again, this is unexpected behaviour.
Now for the truly bizarre. I reject one of the images in the smart collection. Then I edit the smart collection: "Match all; Collection contains all Jewellery brochure; Pick Flag is rejected". I expect all rejected images in the "Jewellery brochure" collection to be in the smart collection but instead get the image previously rejected in the smart collection appearing the smart collection!
It appears that the smart collection is operating on itself and not on the "Jewellery brochure" collection. It is all truly weird and makes smart collections difficult to use. If smart collections are behaving in Adobe's intended fashion then I must be far dumber than any smart collection. If it's related to fact that flags are local then I'd like some insight on the "smarts" within a Smart Collection.

>Pick and Reject flags are local, not global.
Indeed, but I still maintain (using my examples above) that Smart Collections do not work in an expected manner. The smart collection criteria should translate to an SQL query that, for example, finds all rejects in the Jewellery brochure collection. However, I cannot seem to compose a smart collection to do that.

Smart Collection reference Smart Collection?

The "Collection" criteria for a Smart Collection doesn't pick up other Smart Collections, does it?

Right: "collection" means "not smart" collections (only) - not sets.
that said, Lr natively supports smart collection unions (by multi-selecting smart collections), which is useful.
PS - the Smart Filter (plugin) supports smart collection intersection (when multi-selecting smart collections) - which is how Lr used to work natively, and was also useful.. (and yes: it irks me when Adobe removes features which I'd become accustomed to).
R

Problem when enterring punctuation in Metadata and Smart Collections

It seems that Lightroom isn't applying the same logic to punctuation enterred in metadata and smart collections. For example:
Create a photo with City set to "D'Hanis". Just type those keys, LR will replace the simple straight appostrophe with a nicer angled one. And yes, there is such a town--I have many relatives from there.
Now create a smart collection matching City is "D'Hanis" (again, just type that from the keyboard). In this case the ' character seems to be left as the plain ASCII version. This also means that the smart collection will not match the metadata.
Workaround is to select a relevant image, select the metadata and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), and then paste that value into the smart collection dialog box so that the smart collection is truly searching for the value in the metadata.

Hi,
At any case the two headers will not be displayed if you select the both "start of table" and "at page break.". Please check whether there is another widow in the form from where the header is displaying.
Thanks ,
Abhijit

Copy Smart Collection Settings

I would like for there to be a way to copy Smart Collection settings directly. It can be done by exporting the smart collection settings to a file, then reimporting them.
Suggestion - in the context menu for the smart collection, add a new item Duplicate.
This came up when I was building smart collections based on dates and keywords and wanted to create new collections with different date sets.

I've been asking for this ever since smart collections made their first appearance in Lightroom - there should be a simple right click menu.
Instead, you have to right click and export the smart collection, then right click and import it.

Smart collection containing matches with only two keywords

I have added keyword tags to all my photos with the names of the people in the picture. I then created a smart collection with two names in it. For example Jessica and Ryan. That collection then returns all pictures that have Jessica or Ryan in them. I am trying to get pictures than contain both Jessica and Ryan, but not other names. The only way I have figured out how to do this is by entering in the other names in the doesn't contain field. That seems like a lot of work when I have many other names, and it must be updated each time I add new keywords. Is there an easier way?

There's no way built-in to LR to do what you want without listing every keyword you want to exclude. The Any Filter plugin lets you do it, though you need to understand boolean expressions. See the "Exactly one person in the keywords" example for how to match exactly one person. To get exactly two people, you'd define the filter:
All of
Explicit Keywords = Ryan
Explicit Keywords = Jessica
Explicit Keywords all items
Some of
Keyword = Ryan
Keyword = Jessica
None of
Keyword subkeyword of People

Smart Collection matching a multi-word Keyword

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for