19 Messages
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250 Points
Lightroom Classic: Complex / Advanced Search
Lightroom's Library text search function is very rudimentary, far from what is possible with SQL, the database engine underlying Lightroom's catalog.
The default text search is a logical AND ("contains all" or "contains words") which finds photos with all the entered search terms in whatever field is being searched (keywords, captions, or both). You can find terms that begin with a phrase (+begins) or ends with a phrase (ends+) and photos that do not include a term (!exclude). That's it, as far as I can determine.
There is no logical OR capability. For example, there's no way to search captions that contain Morus OR mulberry.
It would also be very handy to limit searches to folders with a particular name. For example, search in all folders that have Garden in the name, or all that have Portrait in the name. In my file system there's one of these folders for each year going back more than 20 years so searching each one independently is tedious and time-consuming in a catalog with over 348,000 images.
Lightroom, at its core, is a database with a develop module. However, the database aspect has been ignored from the beginning.
Responses
ouioui_photo
183 Messages
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1.7K Points
2 months ago
Are you speaking of LR (cloudy version) or LRC (classic version) ? You speak of 20 years of photo and 384000 Images so i assume you speak of LRC.
In LRC you can do any type of search with OR and AND and negative conditions using the Dynamic collections. you can do things like
Condition1 AND (Condition2 OR Condition3) AND (Not Condition 4)
In fact there is no real limit in the combination you can do
Lightroom training : https://blog.ouiouiphoto.fr/formation-lightroom/
Photoshop Training : https://blog.ouiouiphoto.fr/formation-photoshop/
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John_R_Ellis
Champion
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5.5K Messages
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97.4K Points
2 months ago
To build on the other replies, LR does have advanced search capabilities. They're not great, and they're often klutzy, but you can usually get your job done. The search features are reasonably well-documented in the online User Guide, which is no longer available in PDF and is moderately painful to search:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/user-guide.html
As already mentioned, smart collections provide the most search capabilities. They do take a little extra time to build, but many of us have pre-built ones lying around that we quickly edit for the current task.
"There is no logical OR capability. For example, there's no way to search captions that contain Morus OR mulberry."
The text operator "contains x y z" does a logical OR -- a field matches if it contains the strings x, y, or z, regardless of word boundaries. "contains" is logical OR of string matching; "contains all" is logical AND of string matching; and "contains words" is logical AND of word matching; wierdly, there is no logical OR of word matching.
Keyword columns in the Library Filter bar's Metadata browser let you match keywords exactly with logical OR and AND. Within a single column, if you select multiple keywords, that column matches if the photo contains any of the selected keywords (OR). If there are multiple Keyword columns, a photo matches if it matches all of the columns (AND).
And of course smart collections provide logical OR via "Match any of the following rules".
"It would also be very handy to limit searches to folders with a particular name. For example, search in all folders that have Garden in the name, or all that have Portrait in the name. In my file system there's one of these folders for each year going back more than 20 years..."
Two ways of doing this:
1. Use a smart collection:
Then either add more criteria to that smart collection, or click on the smart collection and use the Library Filter bar search to further refine the results.
2. In the Folders panel, type "garden" in the Filter Folders search box, which shows you just those folders having "garden" in their name.
Select all those folders. Then use Library Filter bar search to further refine the results.
(edited)
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