Lightroom: A better search/find in the library module (Library Filter)

No John - I am not.

And I won't stop mentioning my plugins to people, nor yours, nor anybody elses, nor any solutions that don't involve plugins, as long as I think the people who have posted about their needs and desires might benefit from them and appreciate knowing about them. So, you might as well stop riding me...

Rob, if you weren't pushing yours you would have mentioned others like Jeffrey's as well.

You're wrong Geoff. I wasn't familiar with this plugin of Jeffrey's. How about you get off my back too?

Settle down guys, there's no need for this

Thank you John and Rod, I shall take a look to these plugins as soon as possible

The Parse&Audit function of John Beardy's Search, Replace, Transfer plug-in establishes a metadata filter column based on the number of keywords.

Thanks for a great summary John

Another plugin for enhanced search: Data Explorer, which lets you group photos by 150 different criteria. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-good...

+1 star ;-)

And another recent addition: Metadata Extensions (free, by me).

It's kind-of-an odd-ball - you have to select which items are of interest up front (since having all enabled would be a large drain on cpu) - supports having selected (non-exif) metadata items available for Lr-standard/built-in lib filters and smart collections, e.g. stack position, folder path, aspect ratio...............

And also: Space Urchin (free by me), which is even more of an odd-ball than Metadata Extensions, but can be very convenient (especially if you have spaces in your metadata, but even if not..).

And don't forget: AnySource by John Ellis - searching for folders and collections is still searching ;-}.

There is also John Beardsworth's ListView, which supports metadata filtering and sorted results (beware of potential conflict with other plugins).

Have we missed any?

Me? I use most of them, depending on circumstance.

* I use ExifMeta (without XMP option enabled) - once source metadata is in catalog, it never changes, and so this plugin drains ~0 cpu cycles after initially writing metadata to catalog.
* I use DevMeta because I frequently want to filter/search based on develop settings. It requires a big chunk of the CPU (since it kicks in every time you change anything - kinda like auto-save XMP feature), but I've got some to spare..
* I enable selected Metadata Extension options for frequently used items.
* I use Space Urchin if I simply want to consider spaces to be part of search term and metadata being searched (or want to use pattern matching), in a library text filter. (I also have a few "dynamix-enhanced" smart collections).
* I use AnyFilter for one-time or infrequent queries - it's *very* handy (and reliable).
* I don't use Search, Replace, & Transfer, nor ListView, since neither is reliable when also using plugins that do background catalog updates (like Metadata Extensions, DevMeta, ExifMeta, ... ) - John Beardsworth is aware of this problem and so may have fixed it by now - dunno.
* I don't use jf's Extended Search only because I didn't learn about it until after my needs were covered.
* I rarely use jf's Data Explorer - it's a great plugin, but again: my needs were (and still are) already covered by the above-mentioned. Dunno about reliability, but Jefffrey has promptly fixed every bug I've reported, so not to worry..).

Rob

The Any Filter plugin lets you match against the month, day of month, day of week, and time of day.