Search / filter selected keywords and exclude others

[grole]

For many years I've been diligently assigning keywords to my family photos with the intention of being able to filter or search some or all of my archive and show/extract images with selected keywords. So far I've been unsuccessful as I've not found a way to find images with one keyword, but WITHOUT other keywords.

My list of keywords is very short, basically one for each member of the immediate family, one for a sub-selection of photos I call "album", and one or two others for specialty items.

The keywords are in the IPTC content as they're assigned using Lightroom, but if necessary I can also copy them to the ACDSee keyword field.

What I want to do is selectively search or filter for photos with one or more keywords, but EXCLUDE all other keywords from the result. For example, if I search for "person1", I want to see photos with these keywords:

person1
person1, album
person1, other
person1, album, other
etc.

BUT NOT:

person1, person2
person1, person2, person3
person1, person2, album
person1, person2, other
etc.

I've been able to do this with Lightroom by using text strings, such as CONTAINS WORDS "person1 !person2 !person3". The problem is that I need to re-export the results, whereas it would be enough to simply copy/paste the search results.

I've tried using IMatch and that works, but I don't want to use yet another software program and maintain yet another database.

Any ideas on how to do this?

Thanks in advance

[Emil]

Try a quick search for "person1 -person2" (w/o quotes of course). Notice the hyphen. To see the options open the help file and search for "cats".

[grole]

Thanks for the reply.

I did actually try using a hyphen in the search pane in the field "with the text:", and set to search keywords (first having copied the IPTC keywords to the ACDSee keywords), but this didn't work. Why would they allow the use of operators in the quick search and not in the search pane?

So now I tried it in quick search and that does the trick, although of course I get results from the captions as well. Also, it seems to only search the entire database, is there no way to limit the scope of the quick search?

[Emil]

Why would they allow the use of operators in the quick search and not in the search pane?

Don't ask me, since aeons its' this way and no one understands why.

although of course I get results from the captions as well. Also, it seems to only search the entire database,

Well observed :-)

is there no way to limit the scope of the quick search?

See ALT-O - Manage mode - Quick search. There you will find three areas to in/exclude.

The flaws of the search tools are countless.

[grole]

Such a shame. I just tried the latest version (I'm using Pro 10). No improvement.

Anyway thanks for confirming. I'll see if I can work with it, otherwise go over to IMatch.

Cheers