110yd wrote in post #18214268
In Lightroom you do not have to add anything to search exif data. The fields that are searchable
are Camera info, or exposure info. If you know what body you shot with, you will have a grid
of all of the photos from that specific body. Lightroom is basically a photo editing program with
a database, or you can flip that around and call it a data base program that does photo editing.
Click on Library, and then all photographs (on the left)
Up at the top where it says "Filters Off" select either "Camera info" or "Exposure info".
If your camera has GPS, you can sort by "Location"
So if you know what Lens, or Body, you can narrow things down quite a bit.
110yd
Yes and I do use those parameters to perform searches, but the EXIF/IPTC standards for photographic metadata contains lots of optional fields, which they call Tags in the EXIF standard (in additiona to the EXIF standard there is also the IPTC standard for metadata). These optional tags are just that, if they have no data they don't exist in the files metadata at all. Probably the two most well known of the optional metadata tags are the copyright notice, and the keywords. The tag that I am concerned with is to be found in Table 4 section D of the standard, which is based on the TIFF 6.0 standard (I can't find a link to a copy of the Adobe document TIFF6.PDF, which is the current TIFF standard); Attribute Information, which gives an EXIF tag called Image title, with the tag number of 270(10e.H) and corresponds to the TIFF field ImageDiscription, which is effectively an unlimited size allocation of ASCII text. This actually comes before all of the exposure information in the list of tags in the standard. Because these tags are optional, and for the Image title, are not something a camera can yet figure out how to apply automatically, it is usual for that information to be added later when processing the image. I make use of the data in tag 270 when creating custom file names when I export images, so having no entry is not good for me, as I get odd file names, potentially just " .jpg" since spaces are valid characters in filenames. Sometimes being a little forgetful I don't remember to add an entry to the Image title tag, and so I want LR to find all of the images that have that field empty, so that I can add them. It actually looks like I did not have titles set for around 800 processed images. That's what happens when you have a health condition that seriously affects your short term memory. I don't keep JPEG files around longer than I need them, and they don't end up in the LR catalogue, so building the file name from title, caption, copy name original digits makes it really easy to identify the images, just from the filename.
Actually LR complicates things even more, since it copies the metadata from the file itself and add all of that data to the database entry that corresponds to the image, plus some LR specific information relating to virtual copies, such as the copy name, and presents that all to the user under the guise of EXIF and IPTC metadata. Unfortunately though LR is not very consistent in the ways in which it seems to allow you to perform searches on this data, since it is optional, and not usually present by default, being able to look for images that don't have data present is really useful, if you want your images to contain something. Sometimes you need to use different methods to implement searches too, since the options in the search tools in the Library module are different to those available to build a smart collection. In this case Image Title is not an option for the search grid, but is an option for smart collections. In the LR interface the entry directly below Title is Caption, which I think is actually part of the IPTC standard, and that allows a smart collection to filter on is empty, but the title doesn't allow this. It is almost as if there was no coordination between looking for information based on different metadata standards, even though some of the tags/fields are common across the different standards. It would be nice if Adobe would actually fix the mismatch between the different ways to apply sorting filters to data, so that it didn't matter how you try to sort, but by adding criteria where it is missing, not removing it.
So there are lots more items of standard metadata available, and most of the standards allow you to extend them, if you really must. LR only allows you to access a subset of all that possible metadata, and as I have said there are variations in how you can interact with that information across different, but related functionality. I have noticed that there are various add ons available for LR that offer to open up access to more of the tags/fields in the various standards, but generally you have to pay for them, and IMO it should really be available as a standard part of LR's functionality.
Alan
. So any ideas for easily finding empty titles? Oh I'm on the up to date LR CC running on Win 10 if it makes any difference.
