Hi, once folder indexing has taken place, how do you search for images with a certain compensation value e.g. -0.3 ev. The documentation says you can but I can’t figure it out.
Thanks.
I can’t get it to work either, if I type 100 it shows options to search by focal length, ISO, shutter speed etc.
I think you’ve found a bug
You’re quite right LVS. The problem is when you type in a decimal e.g. 0.7, 1.5 etc which Exposure Comp values usually are, it simply can’t find them. Thanks for replying.
I don’t think that we’re dealing with a bug here.
The issue with searching is, that PhotoLab needs specific entries to find things.
One example: Photo with Keyword John Doe
- PhotoLab will find the image if I search for John
- PhotoLab will NOT find the image when I search for Doe
So, how are we expected to search for exposure compensation or metering mode? The data is stored in the database … but in not quite obvious ways.
Knowing them doesn’t help either.
ImO
search should not only be by content (and offering categories), but also by category and then content (as a second option) . As of now, we have no way to set a category … and PL should also be able to handle things like the John Doe case above.
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I believe ImO is right, any search engine worth its salt should enable quotation marks to cover multiple word searches. Interestingly, if you search for 2.8 ( lens max aperture ) you get loads of search results. Sound like scripting issue to me wrt Exp Comp.
The problem with Exposure Compensation is that it is defined in ⅓ or ½ stop increments.
As @platypus shows, these are recorded as floating point numbers, which cannot accurately record such fractions in a format that can be searched for from a text field.
Such search criteria need to be entered as an exact text match in the database.
…but even the ones that are simple like 2.0 will not show…
I also don’t trust ExifTool, it “translates” binary into text so that we can read it more easily.
If I use Metadata (IPTC) to store the name of the subject then two-word searches do find the person, ie. I can search by their first name, last name or both.
Dave will find Dave May and Dave Martin
Dave Ma will find both
Dave Mar will find only Dave Martin
May will find Dave May
Mar will find Dave Martin, Mark et.
I can only assume that keywords are handled differently from metadata
Fully agree LVS. Sometime back I managed a mainframe database for quite a few years, and performing searches on floating point integers was always a problem. Basically you had to search on the field name and then display the full content. To search on numbers, they would have had to be scoped/formatted on input, similar to what Excel does when formatting cells. From what’s been mentioned above, I assume PhotoLab just accepts raw data when it comes to number fields, just one of those things I guess. Lightroom can’t search on certain kinds of metadata either e.g. Exp Bias, but Capture One can. Horses for courses I guess.
Perhaps this post should now be closed. Thanks for all the contributions.
