Smart Collections: Select photos with ONLY a keyword set

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andersl

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Hi!

I just fell in love with the new "Without Keywords" smart collection -- it really made the job easy to find all the photos I've missed to tag over the years.

To make the process a little bit faster, I first made a coarse tagging, throwing hundred of photos at once into broad tag sets like "friends", "The West Coast" etc.

Oh, well, the love for the smart collections withered a little bit when I realized that I can't repeat the process with one of the categories -- in other words I would like to express "All photos that only has the 'friends' keyword".

Is there a way to express this that I, somehow, have missed? If not, who do I buy a beer in order to get this to be added in the future?

Btw, I'm using Lightroom 2.2.
 
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OK. I tested first but what confused me was that I saw more than wanted but at least, only the ones containing a given keyword were selected. Easy then to send them to the Quick Collection.

The How To now:
  1. Empty the Quick Collection
  2. Under the Catalogue list left pane in Library, select "All Photos"
  3. In the Library's filters, select Metadata
  4. In the Keywords column, click the first keyword, go down to the last keyword and Shift-Click to select them ALL.
  5. In same column, deselect the wanted/target keyword(s) with Ctrl-Cmd-click
  6. Select all photos with Ctrl-Cmd-A
  7. Always in same filters column click the wanted/target keywords
  8. In menu, choose beer type... no, not yet... just select "Invert Selection!
  9. Press B to send the selected ones to the Quick Collection
  10. Under the Catalogue list left pane in Library, select "Quick Collection"
BINGO!

Not tasty method but it works! :D

Note that you can also use the same method to find "Contain only those keywords" by selecting more than one in steps 5 and 7.

What about an Imperial Stout then... ;)
 
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After 34628 posts in these forums, this is the first time this question is asked (Yes I have read them all). So, as this is not easy to remember, I just made a Tip & Trick entry on this tested method so we can refer to it in the future should the need arise.
 
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Excellent Denis !!;)
 
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Denis Pagé said:
OK. I tested first but what confused me was that I saw more than wanted but at least, only the ones containing a given keyword were selected. Easy then to send them to the Quick Collection.

The How To now:

[...]

What about an Imperial Stout then... ;)
Click to expand...

Neat trick, but it only takes you half the way... (I could offer you a Euro-lager for the "Invert selection" trick though...)

The problem is that you lost the "smart" part of the selection -- the point is that whenever I tag a friend, that picture should disappear from the smart collection, so that only the unprocessed pictures should be seen.

I think that I have a solution for me, even though I haven't tried it practice:

  1. Select all photos with the "friends" tag.
  2. Color all the photos in the selection red (or yellow, if that should match your friends better).
  3. Remove the "friends" tag.
  4. Make a Smart Collection of red pictures, with the additional requirement that they should not contain any keywords (remember, we removed the "friends" keyword earlier).
  5. Work, work, work (I do have a lot of friends).
  6. Select All Photos, and filter out the red ones.
  7. Restore the "friends" keyword and return all your (pictures of your) friends to the normal grey state.
Clearly, this trick doesn't work if you have used colors to indicate other things.

I still think this would be a good addition to Lightroom -- I guess that I should find out how to post a feature request...

Anyway, thanks for your help, and if you should drop by there will always be an Imperial Stout here for you, or you can pick any one of by brittish ales!
 
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From your original post, it wasn't apparent to me that you wanted that behavior. Tought you just wanted to isolate those with "friends" keyword alone...

Is the following OK for you?
  1. Create XYX keyword
  2. Create Smart Collection with Contain XYZ
  3. Use my isolation trick above
  4. In Quick Collection, select all Ctrl-Cmd-A
  5. Assign XYZ in addition or as a replacement for "friends"
  6. Go to the Smart Collection (contains XYZ)
  7. Do you keywording as you want and remove XYZ when an image is done so it will disappear from the Smart Collection...
 
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Denis Pagé said:
Is the following OK for you?

7. Do you keywording as you want and remove XYZ when an image is done so it will disappear from the Smart Collection...
Click to expand...

Cumbersome, but it might work. However, I really liked a photo disappeared from the collection immediately after I added the keyword. With your approach, I also have to remove the XYZ keyword. It might not seem like a big deal, but I've got 3'''' photos to walk through, so every single thing I can do to speed things up really helps.

Also, I realized that I could do this in yet another way. By having, say, "People" instead of "Friends" as the parent keyword to "Alice", "Bob" etc. I could create a Smart Collection with photos that contains "Friends" but not "People". This, of course, will have the negative effect that Alice and Bob might not show up when I search for friends...

I will try the different methods later tonight and tell you which one works best on practice.

Anyway, I don't understand why LR has thing like "contains" and "contains all", but no "contains only", especially since "contains all" could be expressed using multiple rules. Hey, even the simplest search application provides "equals" and "contains".

Thanks again for your suggestions!
 
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andersl said:
Also, I realized that I could do this in yet another way. By having, say, "People" instead of "Friends" as the parent keyword to "Alice", "Bob" etc. I could create a Smart Collection with photos that contains "Friends" but not "People". This, of course, will have the negative effect that Alice and Bob might not show up when I search for friends...

I will try the different methods later tonight and tell you which one works best on practice.
Click to expand...

I just had a chance and tested the strategy above -- it worked like a charm, even though the keyword hierarchy became a little bit odd...

Thanks for your help! (Now all I have to do is to tag all those photos.)
 
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