Including and excluding tags

[andrewo]

I am currently using PSE 7 on Windows XP Professional.
I have approximately 12000 photos in the Organiser, approximately 6000 are in a category called Tours, with 20 or so subcategories and Tags within.
If I show all photos, that is what I get, about 12000.
If I select Tours, then I get the correct 6000 odd photos.
If I try to exclude Tours, then I get all 12000 photos.
Can any one please explain

[johnrellis]

It's a bug that was introduced in PSE 6 and not fixed in PSE 7: You can't exclude categories and subcategories.

Here's a clumsy workaround:

1. In Edit > Preferences > General, uncheck Show Closely Matching Sets For Searches.

2. Create a new keyword tag under the category Other called NotTours.

3. Check the Tours tag to show all photos tagged with Tours or a child tag contained within Tours.

4. On the Find bar (top left), select Options > Show Results That Do Not Match and then Options > Hide Best Match Results. This will show exactly the photos that are not Tours.

5. Do Edit > Select All and drag the NotTours to the selected photos. Now, the NotTours tag shows all the photos that aren't tours, and you can combine that tag with others, e.g. to find all NotTours with the people tag John.

Of course, if you change which photos are tagged with Tours or child tags of Tours, you'll have to delete the NotTours tag and redo this recipe.

[andrewo]

Thanks very much for your reply, which has solved my immediate problem.
I feel that Adobe seems to have lost any notion of liaising with users.
On purchasing both Premiere elements and Photoshop elements ver 7 I noted a large number of filings and discrepancies both between the above two programs and their predecessors ( the ones that I had were ver 3 and 5 respectively.
I sent my complaints and suggestions to Adobe, but of course they were unacknowledged.
I am actively seeking alternative programs, but so far without success.
Sorry about the whinge.
Thanks again

[ricklepage]

If you used keyword tags instead of categories, couldn't you put 'NOT tag:Tours' in the Search box and get those other images? That works for me, but I don't profess to be a complete expert on the Organizer, so there's very well something I might be missing here.

rick

[andrewo]

Thanks ricklepage.
I tried the following in the search box and it produced the right photos.
tours and not "world tour"
I guess that I am going to have to remember Boolean logic if I want to do anything substantial in the organiser, but I wonder why it is necessary, when it COULD be in the program

[andrewo]

Whoops , missed a bit oof explanation.
'tours' is a category and 'world tour' is a subcategory, so your suggestion looks a lot more useful, I think

[ricklepage]

I understand, and agree that it should be a lot more intuitive, especially since it is supposed to organize your photos. I think the whole category/sub-category/tag thing is really quite confusing to people. It's definitely one of the ongoing questions/complaints I've had from readers.

The nice thing about the Search box is that you can create a Smart Album for any criteria you use. You can't really modify it after the fact, but it is nice for working with an ever-growing catalog.

I don't know if you're a subscriber to the magazine, but we did a feature on the Organizer in the last issue. It had a few nice tips in it, including what you could use in the Search field:

Organizer understands the operators AND, OR, and NOT, enabling you to enter a phrase such as “ballard NOT maritime”. You can even type specific search terms like “make:nikon date:lastweek”. The Date view is a straightforward way for viewing Elements recognizes the following search terms in the Organizer’s Search field.

Power Tip: Text Search Terms
Type the descriptive text after the colon, without a preceding space (i.e. “tag:baby”).
tag:
filename:
caption:
make:
model:
author:
notes:
date:##/## (month/day, depending on the Organizer’s date preferences)
date:#### (year)
date: (today, yesterday, lastweek, thisyear, lastyear)

Hope this is helpful, I've included a PDF of the article, in case you aren't a subscriber (this is one of the ones we've distributed free from time to time).
Rick

[johnrellis]

I guess that I am going to have to remember Boolean logic if I want to do anything substantial in the organiser, but I wonder why it is necessary, when it COULD be in the program
It was in the program, and it is still documented as being in PSE 6 and PSE 7. For example, see this section from the Help:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/7.0_Win/WS6764A184-A0AC-484b-A1E1-A1CC2FC8BAD9.html

But Adobe introduced a bug in PSE 6 and hasn't fixed it since.

[johnrellis]

You can even type specific search terms like “make:nikon date:lastweek”. Elements recognizes the following search terms in the Organizer’s Search field. ... tag: filename: ...
Excellent tip, which I missed in that issue! But I'm very curious -- I'm pretty compulsive about reading docs, but I couldn't find this documented anywhere, either in the User Guide, Online Help, or searching the entire Adobe site. Do you know where it is documented? I'd like to include this and the issue of exclusion in my FAQ.

[johnrellis]

Rick’s tip of using Boolean operators and the tag: keyword in the Search text box is a good workaround for the exclude-category bug. But it’s got some problems:

1. There doesn’t appear to be any way to get an exact match with keyword tag names. For example, the query ‘tag:Other’ will match photos with tags in the category Other as well as photos with the keyword tag “Brothers” in the People category. Even if you double-quote the tag name:

tag:”Other”

it still doesn’t do exact match. I noticed this when PSE 7 first came out, finding many “false hits” when I did text searches, making it untrustworthy. (But using tag: and caption: and note: reduces the number of such false hits.)

2. I haven’t figured out how to use the Search box to do the example given in the Help:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/7.0_Win/WS6764A184-A0AC-484b-A1E1-A1CC2FC8BAD9.html (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/7.0_Win/WS6764A184-A0AC-484b-A1E1-A1CC2FC8BAD9.html)

You can also find photos with a specific person or subject alone by excluding a category or subcategory and searching for a tag within the excluded category or subcategory. For example, to find photos that contain only your friend Chiara, not photos with Chiara and other friends, search for the Chiara keyword tag and apply the Exclude command to the Friends subcategory. Photoshop Elements finds the photos with only the Chiara keyword tag, excluding photos that also have other keyword tags from the Friends subcategory.
The obvious, "tag:Chiara AND NOT tag:Friends" produces zero results.

[johnrellis]

The nice thing about the Search box is that you can create a Smart Album for any criteria you use. You can't really modify it after the factSometimes you can directly modify a Smart Album, depending on the criteria you used to create it. If you've defined the Smart Album by checking keyword tags in the Organize pane, to to modify the album: Click on it to show its current results. Make the changes to the desired keyword tags. Right-click the Smart Album and select Save Current Search.

This doesn't work for Smart Albums defined with other criteria, such as Find > By Details or the Search text box. If you modify the By Details criteria, Save Current Search isn't available and you need to save the album under a new name. (Just one of many annoying inconsistences in PSE 6/7 search.)

[andrewo]

Sorry to keep on about this, but-
I have a category of Tours, plus a tag Andrew.
I want to find all photos that were taken after 1944, that do NOT have a tag of Andrew, and exclude the Tours Category.
Can anyone help as to how to do this, please?

[johnrellis]

Here are some methods that work (and some that don't due to bugs):
1. Enter the text-search query "not tag:andrew and not tag:tours", and then do Find > Set Date Range to restrict to photos from 1944 through the present. As discussed previously, this isn't perfect, since "tag:andrew" won't do an exact match, but rather will match any tag containing the string "andrew".

2. Use the method I outlined previously to define the tag NotAndrew to be exactly all the photos not containg the tag Andrew; similarly define NotTours. Then click the tags NotAndrew and NotTours, and then do Find > Set Date Range. Compared to method 1, this will provide an exact result.
Some solutions that should work but don’t due to bugs or silly design ommissions:
3. In method 1, if you do Find > Set Date Range first, it won’t work, because a text-search query inexplicably and silently clears any date range you’ve set.

4. In methods 1 or 2, if you use the timeline (Window > Timeline) instead of Set Date Range, it may not work, because the timeline has bugs.

5. As discussed previously, you can’t right-click Tours and select Exclude Photos, since that is buggy in PSE 6/7.

6. You can’t build the query using Find > By Details, because Adobe inexplicably omitted the “Is Not” operator for keyword tags.

[andrewo]

Thanks John.
I think I now have enough to do most of what I want to do.
Does Adobe ever read these posts and do anything about fixing the problems?
I would have thought that there should haave been a number of updates addressing the bugs and deficiencies already identified.

[johnrellis]

Adobe almost never provides updates to PSE -- you have to buy the nex version to get most bug fixes. I don't recall seeing an Adobe employee post here, but they may visit now and then. Employees occasionally post on the Adobe user-to-user forum, including the product manager, Bob Gager. The issues discussed in Elements Village are usually also discussed there.

Version 8 is likely due out in a few weeks, and I'll evaluate the Organizer then. But every indication is that for the past two years, Adobe has stopped investing much effort into the Organizer, so I'm not holding my breath.