One of the reasons I chose Lightroom for my software is the ability it gives me to search and drill down to find exactly what I need. There are seriously so many ways to search and find things – it is amazing!
Today we are going to start with Text Filters in the Library module. The Filter bar is at the top of your photo grid.
Looking at the filter bar you will see several different ways to filter the contents of your catalog: Text, Attribute, Metadata, and None. We'll start with Text. Click on Text and you will find two drop down menus and a field for text.
You also have the ability to choose where Lightroom looks for items by the locations you select in the left pane. So if I wanted to search all of my supplies, I would make sure my 0KJL Scrapbooking Originals folder was selected when I began a search. If you wanted to filter just the contents of one designer folder, you would select that folder. If you wanted to select everything in your catalog, you would choose "All Photographs" folder under Catalog.
The location also applies to collections so if you wanted to search a specific collection, you could select it and then run the filter.
The default on this drop down menu is set to "Contains All" which means if you type "Red Damask" in the text field, Lightroom will filter to show only the items with Any Searchable Field (1st dropdown menu) containing Red and also Damask.
** Teacher's Note: if you have a designer name with red somewhere in the name or a keyword of that contains RED in the word – i.e. Katie Pertiet_InspiREDpaper-2 – paper (an Ad Challenge Freebie from 2007) it will come up in this search.
If you select "Contains" you are telling Lightroom to do an OR search. If you put "red damask" in the text field, Lightroom will filter to show only the items that contain red OR damask. As you can see, it brings up quite a few more items.
Contains Words is an AND search that allows you to drill down to find only whole matching words. So if you were looking for Red Damask it would return all the items in the library with only the whole words Red & Damask – you wouldn't get items added in that had the word "layeRED" or "InspiRED" in them because Lightroom will only be looking for the whole word standing on its own.
Doesn't Contain is a NOT filter, meaning that all the photos in the catalog that contain Red or Damask (or any version of it – i.e. Inspired, Layered, etc.) would be included in the items Lightroom filters out or doesn't show.
Starts With is an OR filter meaning that only the items that started with red or damask would be included. To give you another example – if you chose the Starts With filter and then typed "snow" Lightroom would filter down to anything starting with snow – i.e. snowman, snowflake, etc.
Ends With is another OR filter – but this time it will only show items that end in the text you input. So if you typed, "man" in my catalog you would get items by designers Michelle Coleman, Shauna Clingerman and snowman but not Mantle.
Whew! This is a lot to process and we aren't finished yet! You can also combine searches to filter down to what you want – you just have to use special characters to do so.
For example, let's say I wanted to everything in my supply catalog that was red AND damask but NOT paper. I would choose Contains All and then type "red damask !paper"
In a way these complex text searches are like learning a new language:
AND = Space
! = NOT
+before a word = Starts With (i.e. +snow)
+after a word – Ends With (i.e. man+)
The symbols only affect the word they are directly next to so if you wanted to find items that were purple AND damask but not things, you would type, "purple damask !things"
** Now this is jumping ahead to photos, but I can't wait to share. When we get to photos you will be creating keywords members of your family. For example, if I was working on a layout and I wanted to showcase my mom's relationship with her older brother, I would type in Karen ron and get this:
Great photos to choose from and only one of them has just my mom and ron in it. I could actually change my search to "Karen Ron !Marina" and get only the photos with my mom and Ron and not Marina in them. Depending on the number of photos, I may have chosen to add the other children's names as well with exclamation marks – but you get the picture -ha!
As you can see, the possibilities are TRULY endless. And we're just getting started! Happy text searching!
Ryan
Toward the end you mention you could have chosen to add the other children’s names as well with exclamation marks. In my case that is quite tedious because I have so many other names to exclude. Is there a more generic way to find the pictures with only Mom and Ron?
kayla
Great question. One thing I do is use the metadata filter with keywords of two people I am looking for combined with text filter to narrow down. I’ve found that usually there are only 5 people in a photo or less so narrowing things down to only the photos that include both, I usually can quickly find what I need.