Search feature does not search tags

I have imported a small batch of images to Tropy, and have added basic metadata to all of the files. I have since added notes and tags to half a dozen images. When I try to search for specific tags, I get no results, unless the same term also appears in a descriptive note. Any idea why this is happening and what I can do to fix it? I am using a PC and just upgraded to Tropy 1.0.1 (although I also encountered this issue in the most recent beta version). Thanks in advance, and thanks for creating this tool!

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This is actually on purpose: the quick search functionality searches the metadata and notes full text index; it can be combined with one or more tags (you can click and ctrl/cmd click tags in the sidebar on the left to filter by tags). Now that you mention it, though, I wonder it would make sense for us to include tag names in the search index? It’s certainly something we can consider adding.

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I assumed the quick search did include the tags based on information on the home page: “Photos can be grouped into individual research documents or objects; documents can be grouped into collections or tagged. . . . Full-text search covers all of these levels to help you find what you need.” and on the documentation site: “To search across all metadata, tags, and notes, click in the search box at the top of the item table. Type in your search term. Your results will appear in the item table.” From my perspective it would be a valuable addition. In the meantime, it might be useful to include the method you describe above in the documentation.

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Thanks for noting this discrepancy in the documentation! I’ve changed it to reflect our current search capability.

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Yes, this is a feature I would also very much appreciate. Tagging is so important to find you pictures again!

Is the plan still to leave tags out of the quick search, @inukshuk?

There are two planned features which are relevant in this context: one is the advanced search UI and the other is the improved tag manager/selector – both should make searching and selecting tags much easier.

Given that work on these has not progressed much, we’ll give this another thought. If it doesn’t cause any complications, I think we can go ahead and include tags via quick search.

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Yes, I found this confusing and especially since the documentation seems to indicate that tags should be searchable. Given that it is not currently possible to add multiple creators to an item and that tagging seems like one nice possible workaround to this solution, it seems like it would be worth allowing tags to appear.

What follows is strictly my opinion/philosophy but I am very much of the mindset that redundancy is a good thing. I always want to err on the side of allowing more of the data that I have added to a system come back to me, who knows what I may search for years later that I happened to add as a tag, and why would I not want that to appear?

Hi all,

Just to add my opinion on this matter, I’ve always found confusing that tags were not part of the search results. When I’m back from an archives service with hundreds of pictures to manage, the most convenient way to identify and also the fastest to proceed is to add tags with the main names and places mentioned on each of the old documents I made a picture of. Then I can still add notes later but I usually don’t do it for each picture, only the ones with the richest content.

Tags make it possible to quickly find back pictures related to one particular subject. But as soon as you want to find a picture or batch related to two or more subjects at the same time with some of them not being tagged but just being included in notes, it gets harder as you can’t mix them up in the search bar. I’ve always considered tags as a key functionality to identify stuff and be able to easily find what I need, that’s why I think it should be searchable too.

This is probably not a top priority issue but I can only speak in favour of a fix on this :slight_smile:

Just wanted to chime in that I also would love to have tags in search results, or at least an option to do so. Thanks for all you folks do!