[Digikam-devel] [Bug 153208] New: Option to search for empty/not empty or regular expressions for text fields in advanced search

[Bernardo Rechea]

------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
         
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153208         
           Summary: Option to search for empty/not empty or regular
                    expressions for text fields in advanced search
           Product: digikam
           Version: 0.9.2
          Platform: SuSE RPMs
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: wishlist
          Priority: NOR
         Component: Searches
        AssignedTo: digikam-devel kde org
        ReportedBy: brbpub gmail com


Version:           0.9.2 (using KDE KDE 3.5.5)
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs
OS:                Linux

The advanced search allows the logical operators "contains", "does not contain", "equals" and "does not equal" for textual items like image title, image caption, etc. This is a request to add a couple of logical operators: "is empty" and "is not empty". And it would be even better to allow for regular expressions, in which case the two proposed operators would simply be special cases that could be written "^$" and "^.+$" (using Perl's regex flavor, for the sake of discussion).

Here is a practical application. Recently, I wanted to create a search for all recent JPGs that had a rating of 2 or greater and for which I hadn't yet provided a comment. I can do the first three things, but not the fourth:

  Rating     | at least | **
    As well as
  Image name | contains | .jpg
    As well as
  Image date | After    | 2007-10-08

I tried to select photos that had no caption with

  Image Caption | contains | ''
and
  Image Caption | contains | ""
and
  Image Caption | contains |   (that's a blank field)

but none worked.

Thanks for such a wonderful application as digiKam! I can't imagine how I would handle the billions of photographs I take without it.