Today’s Question: I have a similar question to the one you answered about more advanced searches by keyword in Lightroom Classic. I have a collection of photos to which I’ve assigned keywords. But if any photos in that collection don’t contain all of a set of keywords (usually two or three keywords) then I want to remove them from the collection. Is there a way to accomplish this?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In this scenario the best approach would be to select all photos that contain all the keywords on your list, and then invert the selection so you have the images without those keywords selected.
More Detail: While Lightroom Classic includes a “Don’t Contain” option when using a search based on keywords on the Text tab of the Library Filter bar above the grid view in the Library module, there isn’t an option for “Don’t Contain All”. In other words, when you use this option, if an image doesn’t contain just one of the keywords you’ve listed, it will be excluded even though it contains one or more of the other keywords on your list.
Therefore, I recommend selecting images based on those that do include the keywords, and then inverting the selection to get to the images you actually want to work with. In this case that would mean removing the images from the collection after inverting the selection.
The first step would be to set a filter on the Text tab of the Library Filter bar. From the first popup choose “Keywords” so you’ll only be searching the Keywords field in metadata. Set the second popup to “Contains All” so that images will be filtered to only those that contain all those on your list of keywords. Then enter the keywords in the text field separated by commas.
For example, let’s assume based on the above criteria you entered “New York City, Pershing Square, umbrella” in the text field. Only images that have all three of those keywords assigned to them would be visible. You can then select all those photos by choosing Edit > Select All from the menu.
Next, set the Library Filter bar to “None”, so all images in the current collection (or folder) are visible again. Then choose Edit > Invert Selection from the menu. At this point the selected images do not contain all the keywords you had used for your search. They might contain some (or none) of the keywords you listed, but they don’t contain all three. You can then, for example, remove those selected images from the collection or otherwise process them as you see fit. In the example above, for example, that would mean that the current selection could include images with “New York City” as a keyword but that doesn’t include “umbrella” as a keyword. The key is that the selection will only include images that don’t have all the keywords from your filter list assigned to them.
