What's wrong with the Search Function?

RoundAmerica

Your search program pulls anything and everything in some cases and nothing in others. Take my photos for July 6, 2003 in Anchorage and Seattle. Search for 2003-07-06, and get over 1,000 results, but there are only 23 photos tagged 2003-07-06. Search for 20030706 and get nothing, though all 23 photos are tagged 20030706. The photos in this gallery have less than 30 keyword tags, yet only 18 of the keywords show up under the photo -- and none of them are the variations of the date. See http://roundamerica.smugmug.com/gall...427_rr99J-A-LB

In addition, it doesn't seem to matter what order I enter the keyword tags in; your system just seems to pick and choose what it likes. My order is shown in the edit window, but the order displayed under the image is in an order that doesn't appear to have rhyme or reason.

Why isn't the search working right, and can you change the keywords so they are listed in the order we have them on our metadata?

richW

RoundAmerica wrote:

Your search program pulls anything and everything in some cases and nothing in others. Take my photos for July 6, 2003 in Anchorage and Seattle. Search for 2003-07-06, and get over 1,000 results, but there are only 23 photos tagged 2003-07-06. Search for 20030706 and get nothing, though all 23 photos are tagged 20030706. The photos in this gallery have less than 30 keyword tags, yet only 18 of the keywords show up under the photo -- and none of them are the variations of the date. See http://roundamerica.smugmug.com/gall...427_rr99J-A-LB

In addition, it doesn't seem to matter what order I enter the keyword tags in; your system just seems to pick and choose what it likes. My order is shown in the edit window, but the order displayed under the image is in an order that doesn't appear to have rhyme or reason.

Why isn't the search working right, and can you change the keywords so they are listed in the order we have them on our metadata?

Sorry for the troubles. The 2003-07-06 search is returning all hits for 2003 as I'm sure you've seen.

You might try placing numbers and multi-word between quotes prior to entering them as keywords, it will work much better.
Something like this:
20030706 "20030706"
Alaska tours "Alaska tours"

This is why you aren't seeing all of your keywords.
More inforamtion here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags Look under the 'I want all the details' link.

Sorry I'm not sure why the keywords sort the way they do, I'll need to check.

jfriend

RoundAmerica wrote:

Your search program pulls anything and everything in some cases and nothing in others. Take my photos for July 6, 2003 in Anchorage and Seattle. Search for 2003-07-06, and get over 1,000 results, but there are only 23 photos tagged 2003-07-06. Search for 20030706 and get nothing, though all 23 photos are tagged 20030706. The photos in this gallery have less than 30 keyword tags, yet only 18 of the keywords show up under the photo -- and none of them are the variations of the date. See http://roundamerica.smugmug.com/gall...427_rr99J-A-LB

In addition, it doesn't seem to matter what order I enter the keyword tags in; your system just seems to pick and choose what it likes. My order is shown in the edit window, but the order displayed under the image is in an order that doesn't appear to have rhyme or reason.

Why isn't the search working right, and can you change the keywords so they are listed in the order we have them on our metadata?

Bill, Smugmug's keyword ingestion upon upload is seriously flawed. They will NOT simply accept the keywords that you have in your images in your industry standard format and then let you search them. In many cases, they show them as being keywords, but they did not index them the way they show them so you can never find them. The only thing I know that works properly and consistently after upload is single word keywords (no spaces) with only letters, no numbers at all. Since my keywords aren't that simple and I'm not about to change all of my DAM techniques or redo 7 years of images for Smugmug's benefit, I'm waiting for Smugmug to fix this and make it useful to me.

Upon upload, rather than just indexing exactly what keywords you have on your images they run those keywords through all sorts of filters and reject a bunch, break some into multiple parts, add new ones from filenames, etc... Reading between the lines, I think they invented some algorithms for sleuthing keywordable things in filenames and then they used that algorithm (mistakenly) on keywords that come right from your IPTC which is just seriously wrong.

I've discussed this with them numerous times and I think that about 2-3 months ago, it finally got through and they seemed to get it that it needs to get fixed. One of their developers seem to understand that what they have now just isn't right. Now, unfortunately, it seems to be all hands on deck at Smugmug to get a bunch of new features out the door so it may be awhile longer before this gets any developer attention. I've just given up for now doing much with keywords other than very simple things using very simple keywords and am waiting for all this to get fixed so the keywords we enter are index and searchable exactly the way we put them in our images.

You can make it work following a Smugmug-invented set of syntax rules for keywords entered on the Smugmug site. But, I don't enter my keywords on the site - I enter them in Lightroom where I can use them to manage my own pictures offline. Further, I'm not at all interested in polluting my real images and DAM software with Smugmug-specific syntax rules.

Here's to hoping they fix this in the not too distant future.

You can read some of my previous discussion on the topic including their acknowledgement that it needs fixing here.

RoundAmerica

jfriend wrote:

Here's to hoping they fix this in the not too distant future.

You can read some of my previous discussion on the topic including their acknowledgement that it needs fixing here.

Thanks, John. At least I'm glad to know it's not just me. It would seem fairly easy to me to simply index that which is provided. We've invested a significant amount of time and effort into getting SmugMug to work for us in a complete re-do of a number of our web sites. I'm afraid I wouldn't have chosen SmugMug if I had known that the many hundreds of hours spent carefully tagging my photos would not result in proper search results. I now have to figure out how to get photos from a specific day to display despite using four different tags for dates in my embedded keywords. It appears I have to create a gallery for each day.