Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Searchin in Bridge: Spotlight or Bridge's Search?

Inspired by a recent online posting by Lone Digital Librarian (on our wikispaces discussion page) talking about the new Mac OS Lion and the potential search features in Spotlight, I ran a test using Snow Leopard (which is what I have on my Mac).

Assuming your image library is fully indexed in Bridge, here's what you might find. I navigated to the little Spotlight search box in the upper right corner of Bridge and typed in a word (and only one word), "classroom." A few minutes later I had my search results, and it wasn't pretty.

Now I had run tests using Spotlight early on in this project and knew that the search feature was weak to say the least. This time I learned something else, where the limitation rests. Apparently when you type in a word it searches for the word in filenames and keywords and will return those images tagged accordingly. This does not appear to be adjustable.

Oh, and if you type in a word followed by a comma and a second search criterion, Spotlight from within Bridge will search for that combination (i.e., word, comma, word). Not good either.

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