Library module Smart Collection question about keywords

[willywags]

Lightroom Version Number

13.3.1

Operating System

1. macOS 14 Sonoma

How do I handle situations like the following.

I want a collection of horse photos. I put "horse" in the keywords. But I also have photos of Horseshoe Canyon, with that name in the keywords, and they show up in the horse collection.

Can this be avoided somehow?

 

[Califdan]

 

[willywags]

That's a clever solution. But here's another take. My actual situation is more than just horse. I have a collection called Mammals, and the keywords are many: horse, coyote, bobcat, elk, etc. My solution now is to change the way I keyword. I had used keywords to specify location, such as my example "Horseshoe Bend", "Antelope Canyon". Now I am removing such keywords, as I already have the photos organized by location and date. From now on I'll just use keywords to specify other things, like horse, coyote, flower, etc.

 

[John R Ellis]

Califdan's solution gets very close for most uses (but it would still match the keyword "Horseshoing in my horse barn". A simpler approach that is often sufficient: Use "Keywords contains words horse" rather than "Keywords contains horse". The former could still match the keywords "Horse barn" or "A Man Called Horse", but it wouldn't match "Horseshoe Canyon".

 

[John R Ellis]

Another way to get exact keyword match is to use the Keywords column of the Metadata browser in the Library Filter. The column is very clunky to use (huge amounts of scrolling with large keyword lists), but there's a quick shortcut: Use the search box at the top of the Keyword List to find the keyword. Then hover the mouse over the keyword amd click on the right-arrow that magically appears to the right of the keyword. That will open the Keywords column with that keyword selected, and you'll get exact match.

Or use the Filter By Keyword command of the Any Tag plugin to filter by multiple keywords very quickly.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

but it would still match the keyword "Horseshoing in my horse barn”

I think that ends with ‘barn’… But indeed in this example ‘contains words’ is enough.

 

[John R Ellis]

I think that ends with ‘barn’…

Unfortunately, "Keywords Start With x" matches any keyword that contains a space-separated "word" that starts with "x". Similarly, "Keywords End With y" matches any keyword with a space-separated word ending with "y". Two examples:

It's really too bad that Adobe never invested serious effort in a careful design of LR's search capabilities.

 

[John R Ellis]

Unfortunately, "Keywords Start With x" matches any keyword that contains a space-separated "word" that starts with "x".

I had forgotten that "Keywords Start With x" used to match keyword phrases that truly started with "x". But LR 13.3 broke that:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/comm...ins-since-a-recent-release.50567/post-1336300

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I had forgotten that "Keywords Start With x" used to match keyword phrases that truly started with "x". But LR 13.3 broke that:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/comm...ins-since-a-recent-release.50567/post-1336300

That was indeed how I remembered it, so I was puzzled by your answer. But this explains it. I hope Adobe will fix this soon, because it could cause a lot of smart collections to fail, with no alternative.

 

[John R Ellis]

The buggy behavior in 13.3 - 13.4 was standard for many/most text fields years ago until Adobe fixed it. The Alt Text and Extended Description fields were made searchable in LR 13.3, so maybe that code change provoked the bug with Starts With and Ends With. (I think LR's use of the SQLite full-text-indexing package is fragile and perhaps not well-understood by the current team.)