Hi Rob. Can't figure out any other way to contact you. Good to see your voice here, and just wanted to say Hi and thanks again for your Custom Metadata plugin, I use it all the time.
A feature I would like to see in Lightroom is the ability to search for exact phrases. For example be able to use something like quotation marks to search for "Red Rock Canyon" in the key words and only get results that have the words Red, Rock and Canyon next to each other and not results like "Red cars climb rocks in Bob's Canyon" which is possible with the current search tool.
Keyword1 = St. Peters Keyword2 = St. Paul and Peters
There is no way to filter on "St. Peters" in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Paul", which is not a practical solution.
Keyword1 = John Keyword2 = John Kennedy
These are 2 different keywords. There is no way to filter on John in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Kennedy", although John is a different keyword than John Kennedy ("Separate keywords using commas" set in the Preferences - Spaces are allowed in keywords).
Normally, filtering with Keywords / End with / John should be enough to isolate images with the "John" keyword and exclude those with "John Kennedy".
Problem reported the first time 5 years ago, still not fixed in version 6.4. Any developer should be able to fix this in minutes.
Every day I am amazed by how advanced a tool Lightroom is for processing images but how unbelievably, shockingly bad it is at managing a large library of photos. Its like they never spoke to anyone who takes a lot of photos. Are there no Adobe folk loitering around to comment? Its a shocker really. I'm starting to regret migrating from Aperture. If you search for something and have a lot return on the search you literally can't scroll down the results. As you go down it stops and jumps back to the top. Takes about 5 minutes to scroll down to the bottom of the search result, complete joke.
Done it. If anyone is good at social media or is a member of photographic communities where I'm sure a great many people are affected by this, maybe post it there and ask for support. Its an absurd omission from the software that really ought to be addressed.
Actually, since Lightroom claims to be a professional tool, I think that it should support regular expressions. This feature would allow to solve any problem when searching within text. Although regular expressions are often used by developers, some popular software like Notepad++ or Astrogrep have support for regular expressions. Why not Lightroom?
I wouldn't mind how simple or complex the command is. It could and should be really simple, a smart search of some kind, but quotes, a tick box, a code. Anything but the inability to search combination of words.
When Adobe started cloud subscriptions, we were told it would lead to more and faster improvements in the software. The problem with the search in Lightroom has been going on for years, but Adobe still has done nothing about it. Adobe is for what ever reason, ignoring it. They seem to be putting whatever development effort they are making in Lightroom into the photo processing area, but Lightroom is supposed to be a database management system too and far too little attention is being given to that aspect of the program. I can't remember that last time they made an improvement in that aspect of the program. Database management is what sets Lightroom apart from Bridge. Adobe needs to pay more attention to it.
Yes. This a thousand times over. How can they be so good at something so complex but have such a horrible database management system. The mind boggles.
Quite. If I wanted a top of the line photo processing program, I'd spend all my time in Photoshop. This goes double for the mobile Lightroom app, where I don't want to process my shots on the non-colour-corrected screen of an iPhone, but I would quite like to get on with keywording, titling and rating...
Adobe, Adobe, wherefore are thou Adobe if not to serve thy customers? Is anyone at Adobe reading this thread? Could someone from the company please give us an answer to this problem?
Either there is something incompatible with how LR's database engine works and doing these type of searches isn't easy, or Adobe has not prioritized making this sort of change.
Even if Adobe is working on it (and they'd never tell the public what they're working on until it's ready) I'd guess something like this would not happen in the middle of a version series, though, and we're up to LR 6.5/2015.5, so maybe LR 7 or LR 2016 (if those are the next versions) but not before.
I am quite sure it is the latter. This type of text search is basic stuff that is included in nearly all database management systems. Adobe has not given this part of the produce a high priority since the problem has been around for years. Having done some programming myself, I can tell you it is not that difficult to do.
It is definitely the latter. I'm a software architect and I can tell you for certain that this would be one of the easiest things in the world to add. Lightroom's .lrcat file is actually just an SQLite database file in disguise - the application simply queries the database using SQL, and from memory I'm pretty sure the tables are structured such that keywords are stored in a relational table rather than as a comma separated string the way they appear in the UI, which would make it trivially easy to query the database for strings containing spaces, and the UI changes required to implement the feature would also be very simple.
Clearly nobody who has any influence over product specification is looking at this thread, otherwise they would have at least responded to the request. Perhaps there are other more effecting ways of communicating the requirement to Adobe we should look into?
I'm also a software engineer and I confirm that fixing this kind of issue is a matter of minutes.
This bug belongs to what I have called the "permanent bugs" family. They are here since years and they will never be fixed. Nobody cares. They have become a product's signature. They belong to it. If they were fixed, Lightroom would no longer be Lightroom. More seriously, the mere idea of priority list is the basic reason for which they will never be fixed : there will always be a more urgent major bug to fix. They will never reach the top of the list. There are dozens of such bugs in Lightroom. So commenting about the priority list doesn't make sense.
Actually, there should be two different teams (persons?) dedicated to fixing bugs. One that would take care of urgent bugs, those preventing the product to be used normally and one fixing those minor, so irritating bugs that can be quickly fixed. This team should start working with the bugs at the bottom of the list.
Responses
robgendreau
78 Messages
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1.9K Points
5 y ago
I can't believe that in 2016 this is still an issue. I have to at times use other applications just to do what Lr should do itself.
0
damon_crane
14 Messages
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404 Points
5 y ago
0
neil_tonge
5 Messages
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262 Points
5 y ago
Let's get this more widely known and hopefully it should push up their priority list a bit further!
0
rob_cole_2221866
4.5K Messages
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76.3K Points
5 y ago
Presently there is no way to search for "brown hair" without matching everything that has "brown" or "hair" in it. - is there?
This seems like a glaring shortcoming - am I missing something?
4
0
anders_sorensen_6378269
21 Messages
•
782 Points
5 y ago
A feature I would like to see in Lightroom is the ability to search for exact phrases. For example be able to use something like quotation marks to search for "Red Rock Canyon" in the key words and only get results that have the words Red, Rock and Canyon next to each other and not results like "Red cars climb rocks in Bob's Canyon" which is possible with the current search tool.
0
Samoreen
605 Messages
•
11.3K Points
5 y ago
Hi,
Keyword1 = St. Peters
Keyword2 = St. Paul and Peters
There is no way to filter on "St. Peters" in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Paul", which is not a practical solution.
Keyword1 = John
Keyword2 = John Kennedy
These are 2 different keywords. There is no way to filter on John in LR, without having to specify "does not contain Kennedy", although John is a different keyword than John Kennedy ("Separate keywords using commas" set in the Preferences - Spaces are allowed in keywords).
Normally, filtering with Keywords / End with / John should be enough to isolate images with the "John" keyword and exclude those with "John Kennedy".
Problem reported the first time 5 years ago, still not fixed in version 6.4. Any developer should be able to fix this in minutes.
Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: Lightroom: Filter Keywords in the Keyword List panel does not match imbedded spa....
0
neil_tonge
5 Messages
•
262 Points
5 y ago
0
damon_crane
14 Messages
•
404 Points
5 y ago
2
0
Samoreen
605 Messages
•
11.3K Points
5 y ago
For those who don't know what a regular expression is, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression .
0
damon_crane
14 Messages
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404 Points
5 y ago
0
anders_sorensen_6378269
21 Messages
•
782 Points
5 y ago
3
neil_tonge
5 Messages
•
262 Points
5 y ago
0
damon_crane
14 Messages
•
404 Points
5 y ago
0
james_harvey_7953820
4 Messages
•
216 Points
5 y ago
0
anders_sorensen_6378269
21 Messages
•
782 Points
5 y ago
4
0