Request: All Metadata in Smart Collections

[davidmknoble]

I apologize if this is here somewhere, I couldn't find it. I also remembered a lot of discussion during the Beta 2.' testing, but I do not see any additions in LR 2.1 RC1.

(Yes, I did make a formal request on the Adobe Request Form Victoria posted here).

However, I think we should all ask Adobe to include ALL metadata fields as available for rules in Smart Collections. They should also all be consistent: ie, include a rule for 'is empty' and 'isn't empty'.

For example, you cannot currently check to see if the 'Location' field is blank or empty, but you can with titles and captions.

just my thoughts.

 

[Brad Snyder]

David, I agree with your basic premise. But, here's an ingenious work-around for your Location problem. Base your Smart Collection on:

<Location> <Does Not Contain> <a e i o u>. Unless you have truly weird locations, that should rule out most, if not all, locations which are not empty.

I wish I could take credit for this, but I believe I picked it up from Mark Sirota. Don't know if it originated with him, or if he passed it along from elsewhere.

 

[Mark Sirota]

I doubt it was me. Though it works, it's kludgy enough to offend my sensibilities. I'm not sure where I first saw it either, though I think it was on the Flickr forum.

 

[johnbeardy]

Kludgy is being very kind. It's one of my top 5 pet hates (Alt Ctrl Shift Delete being the outstanding winner).

I agree with the original post and have been encouraging Adobe to make all fields in the database accessible via smart collections. In all my time implementing business systems, I always found that if the database contained certain fields, sooner or later users would develop a convincing need to access and use them, so you may as well design to that assumption - regardless of what market research might tell you (people never appreciate the value of things until they have them in their hands).

In this case, by "all" metadata I certainly include all Develop metadata as well as Library info (and was advocating the idea long before Aperture 2 introduced it in smart albums). Just think, you might do a smart collection which identifies all ISO 6'' + images with a certain camera, and which don't have a luminance smoothing value, so you can immediately see which pictures need attention.

John

 

[davidmknoble]

Base your Smart Collection on:

<Location> <Does Not Contain> <a e i o u>. Unless you have truly weird locations, that should rule out most, if not all, locations which are not empty.

Can I use <Location> <Does Not Contain> <a e i o u and sometimes y> ?

 

[johnbeardy]

Yes. Basically you need to list all the letters which might occur - vowels is just a quick and dirty approximation. I'm sure there must be places with no vowels but with a y, and don't forget any accents, umlauts, cidillas....