Help with Smart Collection Filtering

[pflower]

For some reason I can't get this to work. Obviously I am doing something stupid so I am asking for some help.

I have about 6,000 photographs taken in India over a recent trip.  Each photo has a keyword of "India".  I have proofed about 500 by printing at A4 size and each of those has an additional keyword of "Printed A4".  I have further printed about 75 at A3+ size and each of those has an additional  keyword of "Printed A3+". So logically there should be in the region of 425 photos that haven't been printed to A3+ size.  I am trying to make a smart collection for those photographs but am failing badly.

My smart collection is as follows:
Match all of the conditions
1. Keywords contains "India"
2.  Keywords contains "Printed A4"
3.  Keywords doesn't contain "Printed A3+"

I get no hits at all.

I have a perfectly good and functioning smart collection which picks up all photographs that haven't been printed at all. This is simply done with 2 rules"

Keywords doesn't contain "Printed A4"
Keywords doesn't contain "Printed A3+"

That works fine, so why doesn't my new smart collection work.  I can't figure it out.

Any help or suggestions gratefully received.

[john beardsworth]

The contain argument is screwy in Lightroom. It doesn't look at the whole search phrase, but at individual words.

So your doesn't contain Printed A3+ is cancelling out contains Printed A4.

Instead, can you eliminate the word Printed and make your criteria contains A4 and doesn't contain A3?

[pflower]

Thanks a lot.  That did it.  Hugely appreciated - as are all your contributions to this forum.

I do wish you could work out a way to produce a plug in that would address the printing side of LR.  Trying to keep track of what was printed, at what size, how many times, on what paper etc. etc. is hugely important to me and a nightmare to manage manually in LR.  At present I do it by dragging what I have printed into the relevant Collection and adding keywords and sometimes forget to do so.  But clearly even that isn't going to be much help when, as now for the first time, I want to do some "smart" filtering.  I shall have to revise my approach and come up with single word keywords. 

Again, thanks

The contain argument is screwy in Lightroom. It doesn't look at the whole search phrase, but at individual words.

So your doesn't contain Printed A3+ is cancelling out contains Printed A4.

Instead, can you eliminate the word Printed and make your criteria contains A4 and doesn't contain A3?

[john beardsworth]

Unfortunately, although printing information is stored and shown in the History panel, Adobe don't make it available to plugins. Otherwise I would have been digging around to see what I could do.

John

[pflower]

John

Sorry to impose on you yet again.  But there is something going on here which I simply don't understand.

Following your suggestion of reducing the keywords to a single word, I added a keyword of A4 to all those photos printed at A4 size (which were in a manual collection to which I had dragged them).  I then added a keyword of A3+ to those photographs that I had printed at A3+ size (again in a collection to which I had dragged them).

My filtering smart collection of images that had been printed A4 but not A3+ then worked fine.  The rules to that collection (which I shall call for this post the filtering smart collection) are:

1.  Keywords contain India
2.  Keywords contain A4
3.  Keywords doesn't contain A3+

As I said - that works fine and as expected - I get a filtering smart collection of all photos printed in A4 but not printed in A3+.  But what is odd and confusing is that once I print one of the non-A3+ photos from the filtering smart collection I then add the keyword A3+.  What I expect to happen (and what happens in other smart collections I have) is that once I add that keyword the photo will no longer be in the filtering smart collection because the rules are no longer satisfied (i.e. it has the A3+ keyword).  But it doesn't disappear.  Instead what happens is that when I drag that photo to a manual collection of photos printed to A3 size (I say manual because there are no filters attached to it - I just drag it to the collection) then it disappears from the filtering smart collection.  But there is no connection between the manual collection called "Printed A3+" and the filtering smart collection.

My workflow works but I simply don't understand what is going on.  Can you shed any light on this? I am not sure I have explained this perfectly clearly so hope you can follow the logic.

Many thanks

[Jeffrey Saldinger]

I think you might want to consider the difference between "contains" and "contains words" in setting up the search criteria.

Jeffrey

[john beardsworth]

What happens if you changed A3+ to A3plus? The reason for this is that + and - are both special characters that roughly mean "and also" and "but not". So the + may be tripping up the smart collection logic, while "Doesn't Contain A3plus" is explicitly targeting that keyword.

As I said before, the criteria are screwy and it's a great shame Adobe don't put some more effort into this area.