Mark - I think there would be some overlap, but the use cases for saved searches and smart collections are separate.
You would use a smart collection where you are willing to invest real estate in your UI for a window full of whatever-the-search-is. Your portfolio, maybe. Or all pictures of a certain topic above a certain rating. These would be the kind of things where you would go back and forth between the smart collection and contact sheets full of something else. Or return to the smart collection and choose another frame to edit. That sort of thing. At least, that's how I use smart collections.
Saved searches don't take up space in the UI. They would be probably some hard-to-keystroke searches that you may use from time to time, or searches that you want to be consistent every time you use them (like metadata templates), or simply searches that you wish to document for some reason. Or, of course, searches that you use a ton and just don't want to type over and over. You might have dozens of them.
Different things. One could be a workaround for the other in a pinch, I suppose. (With a rude gesture toward Lightroom, where you can hardy search at all except in a smart collection. What a pain that is.)
Mostly, Snapshots are just the Photo Mechanic way. There is a Snapshot button basically for every function that has parameters.
bazography - The Searchable Fields dialog is really a preference. In a lot of big systems, this would be a behind-the-scenes pref for an admin to set for all users. It basically defines what fields are included in an all-fields search. (A default Quick Search in PM+ terms.) I understand that there's a performance cost to having too many fields turned on at once.
If you only want to search the Byline field in a particular search, you just go ahead and do that. No need to touch the Searchable Fields dialog. We won't have to touch it very often. Which is good, because setting it will take a while. And it absolutely, positively needs a Snapshot! You might want to have presets for different purposes, or you might/will need to have a default to return to if you need to modify the settings for some particular task.
What is a debatable question, though, is should the Searchable Fields dialog control which fields can be explicitly searched? Usually, you can explicitly search any field, the logic being that you are explicitly doing so. If you didn't want to, you just wouldn't.
I mean, you're not going to accidentally type "keywords headshot", so that logic says that the fields-to-include-in-an-all-fields-search preference is redundant. But that might tread on somebody's use case, or it might be hard to implement always-on explicit searches.
In which case, Kirk might not want to go that way. If that turns out to be the way, it would be no problem to have a Snapshot that turns all the fields on and another that turns on a default set. There's a precedent for that in the color labels pref. Photo Mechanic ships with several Snapshots that set the color labels to interoperate with this, that, or the other third party program.
So, there, I would say that the "normal" way is fine, but as long as we have a Snapshot, we're good either way.
Hehe - -We're typing responses at the same time. And saying some of the same stuff :-) And yeah, the Quick Search window allows for a ton of customization of searches. I've never seen a desktop product with the power that it has. And the syntax is dead easy. With a popup cheatsheet right next to the field, no less.
