# "Negative" Searches in LR Cloud



## kathya (Jul 9, 2020)

I would like to add keywords to photos that I haven't done already.  Is there a way to do a search for an empty data field?


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## Paul McFarlane (Jul 12, 2020)

None that I am aware of.


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## Laura Smith (Jul 13, 2020)

I've been battling with this. I've got a couple of thoughts. If you have a few keywords which together are applied to most of your keyworded photos (for example, I use a keyword for who took the photo), you could:

Create a temporary album with every single photo in it.
Search that album one at a time for the popular keywords, and each time remove those photos from the album.
The  album will be left with a combination of photos with no keywords and photos with unpopular keywords.
I'd hesitate to call that a work-around, let alone a solution. But it's better than going through every photo in Lightroom to find the ones with no keywords.

What I've started doing is making up my own sets of metadata status keywords. So for example I have "metadata:done" and "metadata: needs keywords". The theory is that I remember to keyword everything "metadata:needs keywords" on import and remember to change the keyword when I've done the keywords. Of course, practice is a bit more haphazard than that! The colon syntax works well because it's the same syntax in the search field as "camera:Canon EOS M3" etc.


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## prbimages (Jul 14, 2020)

A kludgey workaround: Select all the photos you are interested in (hopefully not too many at once!), and export them (small size, no sharpening, to make it quicker) with full metadata. Then use Windows File Explorer to show the list of all the files with their "tags" as Windows calls them. You can quickly identify those without any tags.


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## kathya (Jul 16, 2020)

Thank you!  It should work.


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