Posts Tagged ‘search’
Searching and Filtering Photos in digiKam — Part 2
Besides the quick search and filtering tools at the bottom of the main window, digiKam offers more advanced search features accessible via the left sidebar. Here, you’ll find a variety of search options, including the Calendar, Tags, Timeline, Searches, Fuzzy Searches, and Map Searches. The Map Searches option was covered previously, so let’s take a look at what else digiKam has to offer.
The Calendar section lets you quickly find photos for a specific year, month, and date. Using the tree in the main pane you can easily locate the year and month you want. Select the desired month and digiKam promptly displays related photos. Want to view photos taken on a specific date? You can do that using the calendar at the bottom where dates containing photos are marked with bold. Click on the date you want to view the related photos.
As the name suggests, you can use the Tags section to locate photos containing specific tags. Besides that, this option can come in handy when you need to purge unused tags. Select a tag, and if no photos are found, you can delete the tag using the Delete command in the right-click context menu. If you have hundreds or even thousands of tags, you can use the Search field to quickly find a specific tag or multiple tags. Start entering the search criteria and digiKam narrows the result as you type.
The Timeline section offers another way to locate and view photos for a specific period of time. All photos here are presented as a bar chart, and you can view photos for a specific period by clicking on the related bar. The Time Unit drop-down list lets you specify the desired time scale for the chart: Year, Month, Week, and Day. The Timeline section has another clever trick up its sleeve: you can save searches as virtual albums. To save the current search, give it a name in the field right below the timeline and press the Save button. This adds the virtual album to the My Date Searches list.
The Search section lets you perform searches in a more traditional way. Type the search term in the Search field and digiKam automatically displays the matching photos in the main pane. To make your search more precise, press the Advanced Search button. This opens the Advanced Search dialog window where you can specify additional search options. The available options are grouped into four sections:
- The File, Album, Tags section lets you limit the search to specific albums or tags.
- You can use the Picture Properties section to search for photos containing the desired properties such as creation date, rating, orientation, size, file format, color depth, and file size.
- The Caption, Comment, Title section lets you search for specific terms in the caption, author, headline, and title fields.
- Using options in the Photograph Information section you can perform searches in EXIF metadata. You can, for example, search for photos with specific exposure, aperture value, ISO settings, white balance, etc.
By default, the search finds photos that meet all of the specified criteria, but you can change that by clicking on the Options link. When configuring an advanced search query, you can at any time press the Test button to see whether it returns the photos you are looking for. Once you’re satisfied with the result, you can save the search for later use. Give the search a name in the Save Current Search section and press the Save button. You can then run the search by selecting it in the My Searches list.
Finally, the Fuzzy searches section offers three different ways to find the photos you want. In the Image section, you can drag a photo from your hard disk onto the placeholder and let digiKam find similar images. The Sketch section allows you to draw a rough sketch of the photo you need, and digiKam returns photos that look like your drawing. This feature is a bit hit and miss, but it can come in handy when you need to find a photo by its motif. As the name suggests, the Duplicates section lets you find duplicate photos in your albums. Before you can put this feature to some practical use, you have to create a database of fingerprints which uniquely identify your photos. Once you’ve done that, finding duplicate photos is easy. Select the albums and tags you want to include in the search using the appropriate drop-down lists, specify then the similarity threshold in the Similarity field, and hit the Find Duplicates button.
Searching and Filtering Photos in digiKam — Part 1
Designed to manage hundreds and even thousands of photos, digiKam provides top-notch searching capabilities that can help you to find the photos you want in several different ways. If you need to quickly locate or filter photos, you can use the search field and filtering options at the bottom of the main window.
Enter the search term you want and digiKam automatically finds photos which file names, comments, or tags match the specified criteria. The clever part is that digiKam performs the search in real time, so it narrows the search results as you’re typing the search criteria. Using the drop-down list you can limit the search to specific file types; for example, you can search only RAW or TIFF files.
The rating filter to the right of the search field lets you view photos that match specified star rating criteria. Use the mouse to select the desired number of stars, and digiKam narrows the view to the matching photos. By default, the filter uses the Greater Than or Equals condition, but you can choose between two other options — Equals or Less Than or Equals — by right-clicking on the filter.
While the quick search and filtering features can help you to find the photos you want with a minimum of fuss, keep in mind that the results they return largely depend on the quality and completeness of the metadata of each photo. This is also true for digiKam’s more advanced search features, so to be able to use them to their full potential, you should tag and rate your photos as well as enter as much information as possible.
