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[pgrisham]

I have smartlists that exclude all people except 1 name.  I've noticed, though, that when I add new people to the tags after making this rule, they appear in my smartlist unchecked, meaning they are also getting included in my search.  This means I have to go though all my smartlists and recreate my rules every time I add new people tags.  Is this expected (or am I missing an easy solution?)

MC 12.0.130

[Magic_Randy]

I have smartlists that exclude all people except 1 name.  I've noticed, though, that when I add new people to the tags after making this rule, they appear in my smartlist unchecked, meaning they are also getting included in my search.  This means I have to go though all my smartlists and recreate my rules every time I add new people tags.  Is this expected (or am I missing an easy solution?)

MC 12.0.130

If I understand correctly, there is a simple way to achieve your objective.  Instead of excluding all people except 1 name, check the one name you want and say Include under the "What To Do With The Selections" option.

[pgrisham]

I tried your suggestion, but it still doesn't fix the problem.  Using 'include' and only checking one box will list all pics with that name, even the ones with more than one person.

[marko]

It's not a bug, it's just the way that MC handles "list type" fields, which is what the [people] field is an example of, and its behaviour is, as you've discovered, a little frustrating.

So, when you type: [people]=bob you get all pictures with bob in them, or rather, you get all pictures that contain bob in their [people] tags.

Now, this is exactly what you'd expect, if you just want pictures of bob on his own, the correct syntax would be: [people]=[bob] but, as you've discovered, this doesn't work, it returns the exact same files as [people]=bob, which on the face of it, should be classed as a bug, due to the fact that they are very different searches according to MC search syntax....
from the help file:

[ ] - begins & ends exactly as indicated - [Bob Dylan],  [Desolation Row] - The results will exclude Bob Dylan & the Band because this entry does not end with Dylan.

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MC's handling of the people field is, imvho, one of its biggest short-comings in the image dept, which is a shame. I like the way photoshop elements handles the scenario and would love for MC to try a similar approach.

Basically, it does two searches, so, if you filter for [people]=bob, Elements assumes that you want all those pictures that contain bob on his own, and so lists them, along with a checkbox called "close matches" that when selected, adds all the other pictures that feature bob to the list. There's plenty of empty real estate available in the list header area, making it an ideal place for such a checkbox, don't you think
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Another approach is to use expressions, but again, we're hampered here because when you add people to the [people] tag, MC merely appends the new person to the end of the semi-colon delimited string, so, pictures of bob and sue could have [people] tags written either [bob;sue] or [sue;bob] depending upon who had their name added first.

So, if you only want pictures of bob, and no-one else, a simple expression based search takes care of that: [=isequal([people],bob,1)]=1
That will give us pictures of bob on his own, and nothing else. if we want pictures of of just bob and sue on their own, we'd need to use: [=isequal([people],bob;sue,1)]=1 or [=isequal([people],sue;bob,1)]=1

As you can see, moving on to three or more people would quickly become a nightmare, which could be avoided if MC would write the tag in alphabetical order.

I would dearly like to see some refinement in this area of MC v12.

-marko.

[marko]

pgrisham,

So, if you only want pictures of bob, and no-one else, a simple expression based search takes care of that: [=isequal([people],bob,1)]=1

I guess this takes care of your original question, though hopefully, my comments above will stimulate some healthy discussion regarding MC and [people]

[Magic_Randy]

I tried your suggestion, but it still doesn't fix the problem.  Using 'include' and only checking one box will list all pics with that name, even the ones with more than one person.

I didn't understand that you had more than one person, so my recommendation does not work for you.

And as marko points out, his solution works but it is beyond mortal man (or at least me) to program if there are more then 3 or 4 people.

What I've been doing, is I only have a single person listed.  If there is more than a single person, I call the person Group Picture.  I then use another tag to list who is in the picture (if I care for that picture). 

So I would support marko's recommendation.  If the search could be smarter, the users would not have to be.