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BMC2611

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Can anyone tell me how to create a Smart Collection based on people's names?

If I create one with Keywords > contains all > John Smith (for example), it includes any photo that has a John in it and a Smith in it.

What I want is for it to include only photos of John Smith specifically.

I hope this makes sense. Any advice is appreciated.
 
In this case the user can simply double click the keyword to find John Smith. I've not tried this (ridiculous) idea, but if a smart collection is really needed, the user can add a keywords doesn't contain "a b c d...." (ie all the letters not in "John Smith") or some variation on that suggestion.

Nope. That won't work either, because that will not show Johns wedding pictures. That's because 'Mary Smith' happens to be in those pictures too and here name contains an 'a' so these images will be excluded.

The problem is that you want to exclude pictures with two people who match 'John' and 'Smith' (like John Jones and Mary Smith), but at the same time these people could also be in a picture together with John Smith and then you don't want to exclude them. Catch 22.
 
And then you won't be able to export other synonyms which are with that keyword.

I still think it's a bad practice that will cause pain somewhere down the line, though I'd agree synonyms are better than adding characters to the keyword itself.
 
And then you won't be able to export other synonyms which are with that keyword.

I still think it's a bad practice that will cause pain somewhere down the line, though I'd agree synonyms are better than adding characters to the keyword itself.

Who says there are other synonyms with that keyword? Do you see any? We're talking about names of people for crying out loud. What other synonyms would you expect to want to export? And why couldn't you simply add them to the keyword in that situation? I really think you are trying to create a problem that isn't really there.
 
I really think you are trying to create a problem that isn't really there.

No, I'm speaking from experience of being asked how to sort out many problems with metadata, going back way before Lightroom too. Bad practices always come back to bite you.

Apart from requiring user effort, your synonym method means there cannot be any other synonyms for that keyword. For people, it's common to have unmarried names, nicknames etc, and in any case this issue isn't just confined to people's names. If the price of doing something exactly as you want results in bad practice, maybe accept that it's not worth doing or find other ways to approach it.
 
Think out of the box. If you have synonyms like unmarried names and nicknames and so on, the problem doesn't exist in the first place. Just use those synonyms as well ('match all') in your smart collection! The chance that some other photo will not show this person, but will contain all those names, is practically zero. You can decide that per person. And besides; there is no reason why my wife's maiden name could not be part of the keyword and must be a synonym. It is her full name after all...
 
I am not at home with Lr, but I wonder has anyone tried using other characters. Like a tab?
I wonder what Lr is using to break the phrases apart in the smart collection parser. If only looking for a "space" then using tabs or some other character would work.
 
You can't add a tab, because you will tab out of the keyword entry field to the next field if you try. Other characters will probably have similar problems, or won't show as a space so your keyword looks like 'JohnDoe' rather than 'John Doe'. And you can create problems when exporting images...
 
Has this EVER been solved? Seems like such a simple thing, yet I read this entire thread and there seems to be no solution. How simple it would be if you could just put quotes or brackets around your criteria so it could include the space as part of the criteria...

Keyword contains "John Smith"

Then it would include:

John Smith, John Jones, Mary Smith, Smith Vacation, Canada
John Smith, Bob Barker, Television Show

But NOT include:
John Jones, Mary Smith, Smith Vacation, Canada

This is such a simple thing... why does Adobe make it so hard?
 
One way to solve it informally would be to create your own personal "database" of names, each followed by something like a number, as in John Smith 1 and Bob Jones 3. Then the actual keyword would be "John Smith 1". This could be kept organized in an Excel spreadsheet, for instance. This would be pretty tedious to implement if you have a lot of names, but perhaps better than the ambiguities discussed above. Adobe could also implement it, I'm not sure how hard it would be to add into LR.
 
I wouldn't recommend using artificial keywords - sooner or later you'll be coming back asking how to remove all these 1s or 2s. Funny how earlier in the thread I came up with the term "fake metadata" as long ago as 2016 - where's the copyright application form?
 
Turns out there IS a simple solution. Just change the criteria to

Keyword STARS WITH John Smith

This does not work the way you would expect. "John Smith" can be anywhere in the keyword text, not necessarily the first item.

But it works!
 
It does work as expected, if you understand how it works. ‘Begins with’ does not mean that all your keywords combined must begin with ’john smith’, but that any one keyword phrase begins with ‘john smith’. That means that an image with ‘john doe’ and ‘mary smith’ as keywords won’t be found, because neither keyword begins with ‘john smith’. So this only goes wrong if have a keyword like ‘john smithson’ as well as ‘john smith’.
 
It does work as expected, if you understand how it works. ‘Begins with’ does not mean that all your keywords combined must begin with ’john smith’, but that any one keyword phrase begins with ‘john smith’. That means that an image with ‘john doe’ and ‘mary smith’ as keywords won’t be found, because neither keyword begins with ‘john smith’. So this only goes wrong if have a keyword like ‘john smithson’ as well as ‘john smith’.
Perhaps Adobe can add another choice under "Other Metadata/Keywords" like "doesn't start with", giving "doesn't start with john smithson"
 
Perhaps Adobe can add another choice under "Other Metadata/Keywords" like "doesn't start with", giving "doesn't start with john smithson"
Unfortunately, that would not solve all possible problems. That would also hide an image of john smith together with john smithson...
 
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