# searching for empty caption field in Lightroom Web



## RobP (Jun 7, 2019)

I would like to be able to search for all picture of birds where the caption field is empty.  (I use the caption field to name the birds.) . It certainly shows me all birds but I do not see a way to say that the caption field is empty.  Is there a way?


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## Johan Elzenga (Jun 7, 2019)

You can do that in a smart collection.


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## clee01l (Jun 7, 2019)

You need to create a Smart Collection with at least this criteria:
{Caption}{is empty}

You can add other criteria such as   or {Keyword}{contains}{(for example bird)} or Collection name is some value  or Label color is some value to isolate the image to only those that need attention.  Once you add a value to the Caption field, the image will disappear from the Smart Collection


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## RobP (Jun 8, 2019)

This is Lightroom Web I am talking about here. I don’t think there are collections in the Web version.

Here is my situation more fully explained. I have 50k photos in Classic. Some are already keyworded and some are not. Some have names in the captions and some do not. I would like to take advantage of the Web AI interface and/or the iPad AI interface to find things like birds without having to keyword them going forward. And I still want to add captions to the bird photos whether or not they have a keyword since the AI interface is not so good as to recognize most species and anyway is not available in Classic where I want to keep my photos. So I was hoping to sync my photos, use the search to find all the birds without captions, and go through them one by one to add the species.  I suspect that I could do this with CC but I want to keep the photos under my control and not be forced to pay for Adobe’s storage forever.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.


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## Jim Wilde (Jun 8, 2019)

You can't do that in the Web interface (and I don't think you can do that in the Lightroom desktop app), so your best bet would be to add the captions in Classic then sync the images to the cloud. Alternatively, setup the smart collection in Classic as described, then add the results to a static collection which you sync. Then work from that collection/album in the Web interface (and either remove each image from the album as you complete the caption, or periodically refresh the static collection from the smart collection).


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