Photo Mechanic > General Discussion

search for keywords in a bunch of folders

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sunlit:
Is there a way in PM (Windows version) to search for images with specific keywords, that are located in a number of folders, or at least, in one folder with subfolders.
I tried opening a folder with its subfolders in one contact sheet (there is an option to to that) - however (maybe thats due to a large number of files, a thousand or more images) PM chokes on the search operation and hangs - Windows (Windows 7 64 bit) reports it as "not responding".
For image organization keyword search is vital - maybe I just missed the proper way to do that in PM? Opening folder with subfolders is all very nice, of course, but what about a situation when you need to select a few folders that are not subfolders of a given folder, and perform a search on images contained in them?

sunlit:
With some further experimenting I have found that PM does not actually hang, it just enters 'not responding" state, and continues the search operation - if you are patient enough it may even com out from the "not responding" state and show the contact sheet with found images selected (that's a bit strange since from previous experience with search in PM I thought it was supposed to open a "search" contact sheet with found images.
Anyway that seems to be a bug since the search on mulitple (over 5 thousand) images takes a very long time and all that time PM is "Not responding" - every normal user would think it as finished and go to the process manager to kill the app.
Something needs to be done about it.

sunlit:
one more question on keywords - is there a way to scan a number of files in a number of folders and produce a list of keywords that are used in those files?

Hayo Baan:
One way to achieve this would be by using exiftool (a command line application). With this tool you can extract all sorts of information from your image files, including the keywords. Feed these to a spreadsheet program and you can do all sorts of things.

Perhaps you can achieve the same thing with the text exporter in Photo Mechanic, I haven't tried this thouh and you probably need to tweak it too.

Cheers,
    Hayo

Kirk Baker:

--- Quote from: sunlit on January 09, 2010, 02:41:03 PM ---With some further experimenting I have found that PM does not actually hang, it just enters 'not responding" state, and continues the search operation - if you are patient enough it may even com out from the "not responding" state and show the contact sheet with found images selected (that's a bit strange since from previous experience with search in PM I thought it was supposed to open a "search" contact sheet with found images.
Anyway that seems to be a bug since the search on mulitple (over 5 thousand) images takes a very long time and all that time PM is "Not responding" - every normal user would think it as finished and go to the process manager to kill the app.
Something needs to be done about it.

--- End quote ---

Only the Mac version has a search facility.  The Find function could be improved with a little multi-threaded code on the Windows version.  5 thousand images is a lot of images and it take a long time to get the IPTC and EXIF information for that many images.  You'll notice that subsequent Find operations will be much speedier after the first Find is complete.

Not a bug, but could be improved.

-Kirk

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