Reposted from another discussion:
How I use Find for Keywords
1. In Photo Mechanic 6 navigator, go to a suitable top-level folder. (example “2018”, or “Working”, or even “Pictures” depending on how many you have*)
2. Right-click and select “Open Folder and Subfolders in New Contact Sheet”
(At this point I might right-click on the Contact Sheet tab and add this combined folder Contact Sheet to my Favorites to get to it quickly later on)
3. Cmd-F opens up the Find window.
4. I uncheck “Filenames” and add a check to “IPTC data”
For myself, I uncheck every IPTC field except for Keywords. (Actually I did this last time, and I added it to my Snapshot presets with the “lightning bolt” Snapshot button to save this configuration ^.)
5. Then I do a search for the keyword I want.
6. Pressing F2 (on macOS**) filters the Contact Sheet to only show the selected results.
Getting it set up the way I liked involved some trial and error, but once I had the favorites/snapshots set up, it is pretty quick and I definitely prefer the fine-tuned results over what I was getting in Spotlight. Using that to try to find keywords in xmp sidecar files was a non-starter for me.
Notes:
* My machine can handle Folder/Subfolder Contact Sheets totals with ~10k images pretty briskly.
^ Note that if you type in a search term and then save the snapshot, it will save the search term as well. This is a way to have saved searches
** Depending on your keyboard preferences you might need to use the Fn key to actually get access to the function key functionality. The option is also in the ‘View” menu: View-> Selected
Mick
