Smart Albums Moved to Filters
In ON1 Photo RAW 2019 I can create both albums and smart albums. I can organize those albums in any way I choose. Yet I still have the ability to use filters on any of those albums. This worked great. It just needed a few tweeks, such as being able to filter by RAW files of any type or excluse items, such as filtering all RAW files and then excluding DNG from the filter. Only a few tweeks were necessary to make this feature really good.
IN ON1 Photo RAW 2020, the smart album functionality has been moved to the filters pane. It can be rather difficult to use. Suppose you want to find all the DNG files from a particular event. You happen to select DNG as your first filter. Before you have a chance to enter more search criteria, Photo RAW begins searching for all DNG files anywhere, which will take a very long time. I was unable to cancel the process. The only way to stop it was to close Photo Raw from the task manager. We need to be able to enter all of the search criteria before the search is performed. I like that you can save a search, but that saved search will end up at the end of a list you can only see what selecting "more". As far as I can tell, that list cannot be modified much. You can rename searches, but you cannot organize them or even nest them. I would quickly have a very long list of searches in no particular order. I would have to spend time searching the list itself to find what I'm looking for. I DO NOT like the way smart filters work at all. In fact, I HATE IT! This is a downgrade to the functionality we had before. It may very well be a deal breaker for me.
Why did the smart album feature need to be removed just so the filters could be enhanced? At least if we had both I could choose the one that I like. Please make it so that the smart filters do not start searching until all criteria are entered. Please also make it so that saved filters can be organized (and nested) any way we choose, just like keywords. Will anything be done to fix this? Please offer me some hope that this will be addressed.
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If you add this to the ON1 Ideas, I will vote for it.
https://www.on1.com/products/photo-raw/ideas/
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When creating more complex searches I always turn off the Search Cataloged Folders option until I've finished setting up the search parameters. Then turn it back on to do the actual search. I've complained about this in the past too.
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I was a very heavy user of smart albums and to lose that function will cause to me to look at LR as my library tool.
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Smart Albums are still there, just in a less convenient way. What we did loose is the ability to nest them. I miss that too.
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It's very disappointing that we'd have to vote to add a feature that we already had and worked just fine.
While I like being able to save searches, The new 'implementation' of Smart albums is useless to me as well. Very disappointed indeed.
There may already be suggestions posted on the Ideas page, but since it hasn't been updated in a while, we won't see them there yet. Whoever finds an active one first, let us know so we can vote the crap out of it.
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Fully agree with Gordon.
There has to be a way to cancel search operations. Happened to me too. I had to kill the whole process in task manager.
If working with smart filters there should be a "start searching" button with the option to cancel.
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