Robert Hendricks created topic
4 months ago on Sat, Apr 24 at 9:10 AM
It would be very nice to be able to search the following IPTC fields in the catalog:
1. Intellectual Genre
2. Edit Status
These two variables are both very logical ways to classify images and thus one would very much like to be able to use these fields to find images that need attention.
11 people upvoted this
Brad Glass replied
4 months ago on Sun, Apr 25 at 10:56 AM
This is similar to the thread about making shutter speed and focal length indexable. Perhaps a solution could be to add a handful of customizable fields that can be indexed?
Then Robert could set some to Intellectual Genre and Edit Status, and others could set some to Shutter Speed, Focal Length, ISO, etc. If you don't want to index everything because of database size, then it would be helpful to have some free user choices based on the wide variety of workflows and data fields.
1 person upvoted this
Robert Hendricks replied
4 months ago on Sun, Apr 25 at 5:31 PM
In a conversation with Kirk some time ago, the trade-off is speed of search versus number of indexed variables. Speed surely must have high priority, thus suggesting that there must be some logical limit to the number of searchable fields.
I have no idea as to the difficulty of implementing Brad's suggestion of a few customizable search fields, but the idea certainly has merit. To keep the number of searchable variables down, if this idea could be implemented, then some of the variables that are already searchable could be made part of the customizable set. I am sure that no-one needs every single searchable field that we have now (there are, if I counted correctly, about 90 of them). I would happily trade several of these for others that are much more meaningful to my workflow.
I look forward to Kirk's comments on this subject.
1 person upvoted this
Marziah Karch
Marziah Karch replied
4 months ago on Mon, Apr 26 at 10:32 AM
We're looking at some way to customize which fields get indexed so that people can make their own tradeoffs around speed and searchability.
4 people upvoted this
Robert Hendricks replied
4 months ago on Tue, Apr 27 at 12:12 PM
That is really good news!
David Hoffman replied
3 months ago on Sun, May 16 at 11:53 PM
I think that giving the user a choice of which fields are searchable would be better than just expanding the number of searchable fields. Our workflows and needs are so different that many existing searchable fields are irrelevant to me and ones that I do need are missing. There's no one size fits all solution.
