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Smart Collection Problem

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Gnits

Gnits

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Mar 21, 2015
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2,353
Location
Dublin, Ireland.
Lightroom Experience
Power User
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version: 7.2
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I have the following smart collection.
1524305072499.png


I have given the images in colour a keyword of xcolour. When I execute the above criteria (to find all mono images) it reaveals images which do not belong in the specified folder.

(I have tried with quotes and without quotes on the search criteria).

Any help appreciated.
 
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Have you tried to use only the name of the folder? By using the folder path, Lightroom might also think that an image meets the criteria as long as part of that path is correct. Also remember that spaces are usually translated as 'or' in smart collections, so a folder path with spaces in the name of the folder could be interpreted as 'IPF' or 'Club' or 'Championship' or 'Images' or '2018'.
 
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Thanks for the prompt response.

As a rule, I avoid spaces in file and folder names, but this folder was delivered to me via dropbox so need to retain the name.

I think you are in the right place re use of spaces and the word 'or'. I will see if I can think of a workaround.
I would be extremely disappointed if Lr is not using the full folder address string, as there is no guarantee the lowest folder in a hierarchy has a unique name.

For a company who built Lr around a database this is fairly sloppy standards.

Thanks again.
 
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Can I embrace text with specific characters to protect strings with spaces .. Eg single or double quotes or something else.

I tried double quotes already, not single quote.

Also, from memory, it picked up on the word "championship " outside of the string supplied, so is probably using the space as "or".
 
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Yes, that is the way. This is the famous discussion about people names again. You can't create a smart collection that only shows photos of John Doe, if you also have pictures of Jane Doe and John Smith together. Using quotes doesn't work, and excluding Jane and Smith doesn't work either because that will exclude all John and Jane wedding pictures or the photos of that fishing trip of John & John.
 
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A (potentially) slightly simpler temporary solution is to switch to "contains all", omit the quotes and change the slashes to spaces. Which if you're setting these collections up frequently might save a bit of time and sanity...

Coming at this from a different angle, how important is it that it's a smart collection? You could pop the folders panel open, select the right folder and then use a library filter to filter for the keyword. Flippin' annoying if you want to keep switching in and out of that view tho ;). But might do for a one-off.
 
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Gnits said:
Can I embrace text with specific characters to protect strings with spaces .. Eg single or double quotes or something else.
Click to expand...

One of my pet peeves with all the search strings in Lightroom is that there is not a way to search with imbedded spaces. It seems to be a design decision by Adobe because the underlying LUA language search supports quoted and escaped characters. Maybe it is an implementation issue with SQLite. In any case I think that it makes real world searching difficult.

-louie
 
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I'm not sure if this will work, but you could try substituting %20 for each of the spaces in the folder path. This is a limitation on some software to resolve a UNC file path (network/internet). ie: "IPF%20Club%20Championship%20Images%202018"
Continue to use double quotes.

-Allan
 
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I made a list of my pet peeves a long time ago. Every major release I check if there is any progress on these items. Most of them are still outstanding.

I have a tedious and error prone work around for spaces , so I can move on.

When I wrote my own preprocessor for Lr I took into account the proper handling of illegal characters for filenames in Windows, Mac and Linux. I of meager resources would think Adobe would cater for the proper handling of folder and filenames in search strings in a commercial product, with much more qualified skills than I as a single user could muster.

So be it.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
 
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