Today’s Question: Is it possible to search on words within a keyword to find photos in Lightroom Classic? For instance, I would like to find all photos that contain Manhattan as part of their keyword. Would it find the photo with the keyword “Johnny-Manhattan-01152022”?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can search for all images that include specific text within keywords, so that for example searching for “flo” would return images that have either “Florida” or “flower” as a keyword. You can also search only for photos that include a specific keyword in its entirety.
More Detail: In Lightroom Classic there is quite a bit of flexibility when searching on the Text tab of the Library Filter bar above the grid view display in the Library module. Note, by the way, that if the Library Filter bar is not displayed you can press the backslash key (\) on the keyboard to reveal it.
On the Text tab of the Library Filter bar you can start by selecting Keywords from the first popup if you want to search specifically within the Keywords field in metadata. If you want the search results to include any images with keywords that include the partial text you’ve entered, you can select “Contains” from the second popup.
With these settings established, for example, if I enter the text “Manhattan” in the textbox the search results will include photos with the keyword “Manhattan” as well as photos that include the keyword “Manhattanhenge”.
If, on the other hand, you want to search for a specific word within the Keywords field without including keywords that contain the word you’ve typed, you can use the “Contains Words” option from the second popup when searching with the “Keywords” option.
With “Contains Words” selected, for example, if you enter “Manhattan” into the textbox the results will only include photos that have “Manhattan” as a keyword. Photos that only have “Manhattanhenge” in the Keywords field (and not the keyword “Manhattan”) will not appear in the search results.
