Using GREP to identify blank Keyword fields

[harvey@croze.net]

I wish to isolate those images that have no keywords, that is, empty or blank keyword fields.  Can someone help me with a GREP string? Many thanks.

[RogerB]

Assuming you have all of the images you're interested in displayed in a contact sheet, I think I would do that by using the Find function to do a grep search for ".+" (without the quotes) in the keywords field (i.e. one or more characters are present in the keywords).  That will select all of the images that do have keywords, then invert the selection and you have all those without keywords selected.

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

I'm not sure if you have a particular need to use Grep for educational purposes, but if all you want to do is find items in a Contact Sheet that don't have any keywords, you could do Find restricted to the Keywords field and just leave the search box empty. Make sure "All the words" is selected.

Mick

[harvey@croze.net]

So simple!  Brilliant!  Thanks, folks, for breaking my mental logjam. Both solutions work a treat.  (Actually, I had initially tried Mick's solution to no avail. Armed with his tip, I went back to the contact sheet and looked carefully at the selections. Turns out, I had inadvertently ticked one of the other items in the metadata field list which must have muddled up the search.). Thanks all round. HC