Search photos without keywords

Although the ability to find photos with no keywords was available in iPhoto it is not included in the photos.app. I miss this feature a lot and the only decent work around I have found is to create a smart album that has multiple filters of "keyword is not (followed by one of your common keywords)". Its a bit daunting but you can add to it as you find more keywords you need to filter out. I have approximately 50 filters to make this smart album useful.

timmacman wrote:

Although the ability to find photos with no keywords was available in iPhoto it is not included in the photos.app. I miss this feature a lot and the only decent work around I have found is to create a smart album that has multiple filters of "keyword is not (followed by one of your common keywords)". Its a bit daunting but you can add to it as you find more keywords you need to filter out. I have approximately 50 filters to make this smart album useful.

I do the same thing but it's not easily manageable as, like you, I have so many keywords (and they will sometimes change).

As smart albums are based on rules, include negative conditions ("is not"), and keywords are so fundamental to managing increasingly large libraries, it's baffling that Apple have decided not to include a negative rule for keywords.

Hopefully Sierra will tidy up some of these omissions but I'm not hopeful.

All my albums has been tagged with a keyword

Are those regular albums?

If yes, then you can search for photos by creating a smart album with the constrain "Album is not any".

That will show you al photos that are not in any regular album.

But you cannot write a constraint "Keyword is not any", that option is missing in Photos.

I would also like to search for photos that have no keyword as a cross check to what photos have missed my filing system. Slightly surprised it's not available, as it's relatively straight forward task.

On the "Album is not any" smart album process above, what do the results show? I have a mixture of smart albums and manually created albums. Do the results mean those photos are not in smart, manual, or both?

Thank you

The constraint "Not in Any Album" will only apply to photos not in standard albums. Smart albums are excluded, because it would lead to a logical contradiction if smart albums were included.

If a photo appears in the "Not in Any" album it is in an album and must not be in this album. But if it is not in the album, it should be in the album, which is not possible.

Apologies but I don't quite follow the second para.

Not sure what the contradiction would be (for example, I actually want to find photos not filed in smart or standard albums) but from the first para I understand that "Not in any Album" only applies to manual albums created by me and not smart albums

Thank you

tell Apple - maybe it will come out in a future update - http://www.apple.com/feedback/

LN

Think about it - a smart album to show all photos not in a smart album can not ever have anything it is since as soon as it was added to the smart album it would be in a smart album

LN