Search for image title will not work

mercphoto · June 3, 2005

Any particular reason why I can't search for an image if I know the file name or image title?

mercphoto · June 3, 2005

More info

mercphoto wrote:

Any particular reason why I can't search for an image if I know the file name or image title?

In particular, I was trying to search for this image:
http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/560276/4/23327229

The caption is "K050528_0148a k9k24k2k".
A search for K050528_0148 fails. In fact, I can't find ANY of my photos by image name, even though the image name is in a caption field.

And a search for "k9k" found plenty of hits, but not this one. A search for "k9k24k2k" found nothing.

Searching on Smugmug has never seemed completely accurate. A fix for this would be really nice.

mercphoto · June 8, 2005

Bump. I'd really like an answer to this. Why can't I search for image by image name? It resides in the caption field, and I can search for other strings in the caption field. Just not image name.

onethumb · June 8, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

In particular, I was trying to search for this image:
http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/560276/4/23327229

The caption is "K050528_0148a k9k24k2k".
A search for K050528_0148 fails. In fact, I can't find ANY of my photos by image name, even though the image name is in a caption field.

And a search for "k9k" found plenty of hits, but not this one. A search for "k9k24k2k" found nothing.

Searching on Smugmug has never seemed completely accurate. A fix for this would be really nice.

I really wish I could help you here, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work that way. You mention that the caption name is "K050528_0148a k9k24k2k". Then you mention that you can't search for "K050528_0148" and that that's a problem.

I'm afraid that smugmug doesn't realize that when you searched for "K050528_0148" you really meant "K050528_0148a" (note the missing 'a').

When I search for either "K050528_0148a" or "k9k24k2k", I get results:

K050528_0148a

k9k24k2k

Note that there can be a time delay between uploading/captioning photos and their availability in the search engine. Usually it's only a few minutes, but sometimes it can be much longer (in rare cases, days), it entirely depends on how busy the search cluster is. Like Google, everything can't be 100% fresh all the time.

If I've missed the problem entirely, please yell at me. I'm known to be oblivious from time to time...

Don

mercphoto · June 8, 2005

onethumb wrote:

I'm afraid that smugmug doesn't realize that when you searched for "K050528_0148" you really meant "K050528_0148a" (note the missing 'a').

So its not a sub-string search.

When I search for either "K050528_0148a" or "k9k24k2k", .... Note that there can be a time delay between uploading/captioning photos and their availability in the search engine. Usually it's only a few minutes, but sometimes it can be much longer (in rare cases, days), it entirely depends on how busy the search cluster is.

This may be part of the problem. I searched for that photo in huge variety of ways. Including with the "a", with the entire "k9k..." word, etc. No hits at all. And that gallery was up a week at the time. And I even know that those particular photos themselves had been viewed as medium images.

So, on to the bigger issue. If I intend to caption photos so that users can search and find them after a race, but the search indexing can sometimes take days, what should I do? How to make it easy for racers to find their photos?

onethumb · June 8, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

So its not a sub-string search.

This may be part of the problem. I searched for that photo in huge variety of ways. Including with the "a", with the entire "k9k..." word, etc. No hits at all. And that gallery was up a week at the time. And I even know that those particular photos themselves had been viewed as medium images.

So, on to the bigger issue. If I intend to caption photos so that users can search and find them after a race, but the search indexing can sometimes take days, what should I do? How to make it easy for racers to find their photos?

(Just found and corrected a results bug, btw. It was dropping the first result in some cases. That might be part of your problem. My bad!)

I know this might not provide much solace, but 99.99% of the time, I'd guess the photos would show up in search within 5 minutes or less. Only in rare cases, say where we're upgrading hardware or doing work on the search cluster, will things tend to slow down.

Try it yourself a few times over the next few days and see. I can tell you, our peak usage times are late afternoons (pacific time) on Sunday and all day Monday. We're getting more traffic @ smugmug, by a large margin, than we ever have (I expect that to die down once people get enough of a look at Rafa), so this is a good test time for index freshness.

Also, I have quite a few tricks in the pipe to dramatically speed up search results. No promises on when, but keeping our searching both fast and fresh is a high priority for me.

Don

onethumb · June 8, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

So its not a sub-string search.

Not by default, no. You can force it to be a substring search by using the "*" character. (I just found a bug with that, too. For some reason, it's only working with multi-word searches, not single results. A fix will be in the next push).

For an example of multi-word substring, try "+band* +cobi", which will match a photo of my dog, Cobi, in a bandana:

+band* +cobi

When the fix is out, "K050528_0148*" would match "K050528_0148a" and "K050528_0148abababab" and so forth. (It used to work, stupid typo. Guess I know how many people use this feature

).

Don

Search for image title will not work

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