Any Filter

Any Filter lets you search, explore, sort, and export many more photo fields (criteria) than are built-in to Lightroom, including IPTC Extension, GPS location, library properties, develop settings, and plugin fields (869 fields in all). Additional operators include exact text match, matching regular expressions, testing empty fields, distinguishing explicit from implicit ancestor keywords, treating text fields as numeric, and including other saved Any Filters and smart collections.

Define search queries similar to smart collections. Example Any Filters include:

Explore field values using a column browser similar to the Library Filter bar’s metadata browser. But Any Filter’s column browser can display any field, including those with thousands of unique values:

Sort photos by one or more fields and save the sorted list in a collection or export the list with the selected fields to a text file:

Any Filter also provides additional commands:

• By Date: filters by dates and date ranges without fussing with the Library Filter bar;
• Fix Burst Times: sets the fractional seconds of bursts of photos so they sort properly in Library.

Try it for free for 30 days. Buy a license at a price you name.

Download and Install

Any Filter requires Lightroom 5 or later, Lightroom CC 2015, or Lightroom Classic. (The newer cloud-focused Lightroom doesn’t support plugins.)

1. Download anyfilter.1.67.zip.
2. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Any Filter, exit Lightroom, delete the existing anyfilter.lrplugin folder, and replace it with the new one extracted from the downloaded .zip. Restart Lightroom and you’re done.
3. If this is a new installation, extract the folder anyfilter.lrplugin from the downloaded .zip and move it to a location of your choice.
4. In Lightroom, do File > Plug-in Manager.
5. Click Add, browse and select the anyfilter.lrplugin folder, and click Select Folder (Windows) or Add Plug-in (Mac OS).

The free trial is for 30 days—after that, you’ll need to buy a license.

Buy a License

1. Buy a license at a price you think is fair:  
   
   The license includes unlimited upgrades. Make sure you’re satisfied with the free trial before buying.
2. Copy the license key from the confirmation page or confirmation email.
3. Do Library > Plugin-Extras > Any Filter > Search.
4. Click Buy.
5. Paste the key into the License key box and click OK.

Using Any Filter > Search

Creating an Any Filter is very similar to creating a smart collection. If you’re not familiar with smart collections, I recommend you read the Adobe Help before trying to use Any Filter. Any Filter includes all the criteria of smart collections and adds many more.

Any Filter commands are available under Library > Plug-in Extras > Any Filter menu as well as File > Plug-in Extras > Any Filter. Their location under File allows them to be used in any module, while the Library menu is retained for users accustomed to earlier versions of Any Filter.

Applying a Saved Any Filter

When you apply a saved Any Filter, all the images in the currently selected folder or collection are filtered to show just the ones matching the Any Filter. Unlike smart collections, the results aren’t automatically updated as you change images—reapply the filter to see new results.

To apply a saved Any Filter:

1. Do Library > Plug-in Extras > Any Filter > Search (keyboard shortcut ALT+L U S on Windows).
2. Click Any Filters in the upper left.
3. Select one of the saved Any Filters on the right.
4. To search only visible photos (showing in Grid mode or in the filmstrip), rather than the entire catalog, check Visible photos only.
5. Click Apply, or double-click the selected Any Filter.
6. The Library Filter bar will be updated to filter all the images in your catalog that match the criteria of the selected Any Filter.

Each time you apply an Any Filter, the resulting photos are saved in a new collection under the collection set Any Filter Results. Any Filter retains the most recent 8 results. If you want to retain one of the collections permanently, rename it or move it to another collection set. You can disable saving of results by unchecking the option Save results as a collection.

If you don’t want the currently selected folder or collection filtered to show the results, then uncheck Show results using a Library filter. View the results via the collection set Any Filter Results.

To enable reasonably fast searching, Any Filter uses Lightroom’s built-in search facilities wherever possible. But Lightroom has numerous obscure bugs in its search. If you suspect you’re encountering such a bug, use the Avoid Lightroom bugs option. This will avoid the bugs, at the expense of much slower searching.

Applying a Collection or Smart Collection

As a convenience, you can filter using an existing collection or smart collection rather than a saved Any Filter. This lets you view the contents of a collection with all the contained stacks collapsed (Lightroom doesn’t show stacking for collections). It also lets you snapshot the contents of a smart collection, which is handy when you don’t want the set of images matched by the smart collection to automatically update as you modify them.  And it lets you intersect the results of a smart collection or collection with a folder, functionality that was removed from Lightroom 4.

1. Do Library > Plug-in Extras > Any Filter > Search (keyboard shortcut ALT+L U S on Windows).
2. Click Collections in the upper left.
3. Select one of the collections or smart collections on the right.
4. Click Apply, or double-click the selected collection.
5. The Library Filter bar will be updated to filter just the images in the collection.

Creating and Editing an Any Filter

Creating and editing an Any Filter is similar to creating a smart collection:

1. Do Library > Plug-in Extras > Any Filter > Search (keyboard shortcut ALT+L U S on Windows).
2. Click an existing Any Filter or click New.
3. Enter a name for the Any Filter.
4. The current criteria are displayed, one per line. To edit a criterion, click on it and then use the drop-downs and edit fields to change the criterion:
   
   
   
   Click the magnifying glass 🔎 to search for a field rather than use the drop-downs.
5. To add a new criterion after the currently selected one, click the “+” button; to delete a criterion, click the “-” button.

Searching Plug-in Metadata

Any Filter can search custom metadata fields defined by plug-ins. To tell Any Filter to search a plug-in’s fields:

1. Click Plug-in Metadata.
2. Click Add Plug-in.
3. Browse to folder containing the plug-in and click OK.

When editing an Any Filter, the plug-in will now be listed in the left-most drop-down menu along with the other categories of criteria (Library, Date/Time, Description, etc.).

Plug-ins that store numbers in their metadata fields store the numbers as texts, but you can use Any Filter’s numeric-text operators (< number, = number, etc.) to treat those fields as numeric.

If Add Plug-in gives an error, the plug-in is likely incompatible with Any Filter (due to deficiencies in Lightroom’s plugin support). In that case, use the Scan Catalog button to scan all the photos in the catalog and extract the plug-in metadata fields it finds. These fields will appear as criteria in the Plug-in Fields category with names like com.johnrellis.anyvision.text. Contact the plug-in’s developer for questions about the meanings of the plug-in’s fields. Use the Filter command to see the range of values for a particular plug-in field.

Any Filter Criteria

Any Filter provides all of the searchable photo fields (criteria) and operators of smart collections and many more, including IPTC Extension, GPS location, library properties, develop settings, and plugin fields. The complete list is available here. Additional operators include exact text match, matching regular expressions, testing empty fields, distinguishing explicit from implicit ancestor keywords, treating text fields as numeric, and including other saved Any Filters and smart collections.

Text Operators

Any Filter provides the following operators for comparing text fields. All comparisons ignore case; for example, JOHN and john are treated as identical. If a field is missing from a photo, it is treated as present but empty.

= value    (!=)
Matches if the field is identical to value.

contains value    (doesn't contain)
Matches if at least one space- or comma-separate sequence in value is contained somewhere in the field. For example, contains lo to matches bright colors and old photos.

contains all value
Matches if every space- and comma-separated sequence in value is contained somewhere in the field. For example, contains all lo to matches color photos but not old photos.

contains words value
Matches if every space- and comma-separated sequence in value matches a “word” in the field, where a word is a sequence consisting only of letters, digits, and the characters – _ ‘ /. For example, contains words joe bob matches bob and joe ellis but not joey and bob.

starts with value
Matches if the field starts with the characters in value. For example, starts with color photo matches color photos 1960 but not old color photos.

ends with value
Matches if the field ends with the characters of value. For example, ends with lor photos matches faded color photos but not color photos 1960.

is empty    (isn't empty)
Matches if the field is empty or missing from the photo.

< value    (<=, >=, >)
Matches if the field comes before value in lexicographic ordering, comparing every character of the field and value. <= matches if the field comes before or is the same as value.

matches pattern (doesn't match)
Matches if pattern matches the field using the pattern matching documented here. For example, matches day [0-9]+ matches day 5 of the race and yesterday 1979. Note that matches is case sensitive, unlike all the other operators, which ignore case. The Lua string escapes are recognized in the pattern, including \n (newline) and \ddd (specifying a byte value with a decimal number). Due to Lightroom limitations, the patterns match against the individual bytes of the UTF-8 encoding rather than the Unicode characters. Thus, a pattern such as 相* doesn’t match zero or more occurrences of the character 相—rather, it matches the first two bytes of the UTF-8 encoding of that character, \231 \155, and then zero more occurrences of the third byte, \184.

< number value (<= number, = number, != number, >= number, > number)
These operators treat the field as a number and compare it numerically with value. Any characters following a leading number in the field are ignored, and the criterion never matches if the field doesn’t begin with a number. For example, < number 50 matches 49GKX and 3 dogs but not 50GKX or dogs 49.

Fields with Multiple Values

Any Filter provides more flexibility with fields like Collections and Keywords that contain multiple values. As with smart collections, you can define a criterion Keywords = John that matches a photo if at least one of its keywords is equal to John. But you can also define that criterion more explicitly as:

Keywords some items
    Keyword = John

which is true if at least one of the keywords is equal to John. Similarly, the criterion Keywords != John matches if none of the keywords matches John; this is equivalent to:

Keywords no items
    Keyword = John

Using this explicit testing of individual items, you can write more complicated criteria:

Keywords all items
    Some of
        Keyword = John
        Keyword = Peter

This matches a photo if all of its keywords are either John or Peter. See the predefined Any Filter Exactly two people in the keywords for how to write a more complicated filter that matches photos that contain exactly two person keywords (subkeywords of People) and no others.

Some of the IPTC Extension fields are actually sequences of multiple subfields. For example, the Locations Shown field can contain one or more locations, each of which has a City, Country Code, Country, Province/State, Sublocation, and World Region. To match photos showing the location Palo Alto, CA:

Locations Shown some items
    All of
        City = Palo Alto
        State/Province = CA

For any field with multiple values, you can test the number of values using the number of operators. For example, to match photos with no more than 2 explicit keywords assigned:

Explicit Keywords number of <= 2
     Include all items

To match photos with exactly 2 explicit keywords that are subkeywords of People:

Explicit Keywords number of = 2
     Keyword subkeyword of People

To match photos with at least one Person keyword (a keyword added by face recognition):

Explicit Keywords number of >= 1
     Person is true

To match photos with no keywords that will be exported:

Explicit Keywords number of = 0
     Include on Export is true

Explicit Keywords

Lightroom’s smart collections and filtering define the Keywords criterion to mean any keywords that have been explicitly applied to the photo, the corresponding ancestor keywords, and any synonyms of those keywords. For example, if the keyword People > Family > John has been applied to a photo, then the smart collection Keywords contains People will match that photo.

With Any Filter’s Explicit Keywords criterion, you can match the explicitly applied keywords only, ignoring synonyms and the implicit ancestor keywords. You can use the subkeyword of operator to test if an explicit keyword is a subkeyword or identical to another keyword. For example, the criterion Explicit Keywords subkeyword of People is the same as Keywords = People. See the predefined Any Filter Exactly one person in the keywords for an example.

The criterion Explicit Keywords contains ancestors has a unique purpose, to identify a photo that has both a keyword and its ancestor explicitly applied, for example, People and People > Family > John. This can be handy when you’re adding more levels of detail to your keyword hierarchy and want to find photos where you’ve accidentally applied both a keyword and its ancestor.

Crop Ratios

The criteria Standard Crop Ratio and Uncropped Standard Crop Ratio give the built-in crop ratio nearest to the photo’s aspect ratio (1 x 1, 5 x 4, 11 x 8.5, 4 x 3, 7 x 5, 3 x 2, 16 x 10, 16 x 9, or Very Long).

Use Numeric Aspect Ratio (the photo’s width / height) to search for precise ratios that may be slightly different from the standard crop ratios. Beware that since photos have an integral number of pixels in each dimension, their precise ratio may be slightly different than the standard crop ratio. For example, a 10 x 8 that’s 4543 pixels wide will have a height of 3634 pixels, which has an approximate ratio of 1.25014. So use the in range operator to include ratios that are a little smaller or bigger:

Numeric Aspect Ratio in range 1.249 to 1.251

Comments and Likes

Lightroom retrieves and stores comments and likes made by other users on photos in public synced collections and publish services like Flickr, but it’s near-impossible to find such photos with Lightrooms built-in features, so Any Filter provides criteria for finding them.

Date/Time Last Comment or Like is when someone last commented or liked a photo. To find comments or likes made in the last three days, use the built-in filter Comments or likes in the last 3 days, defined as:

Date/Time Last Comment or Like is in the last 3 days

Comment Texts searches the texts of the comments. To find comments containing “lighten shadows”:

Comment Texts contains words lighten shadows

Comment Authors searches the names of the comments’ authors. Number of Comments and Number of Likes searches the number of comments and likes on a photo. Comment Details lets you search all the specifics, including the collection in which the comment was made and the publish service (e.g. Flickr).

To view the comments and likes of a photo and possibly reply to them using the Comments panel in the right column of Library, you need to select the published or synced collections in which the comments were made, which can be tedious if the photo appears in many collections. Select a photo with comments and do File > Plug-in Extras > Next Collection with Comments, which selects the next collection containing a comment or like on the photo. Repeatedly invoking that command cycles through all such collections for a photo.

ExifTool Field

The ExifTool Field criterion (in the Description category) lets you search virtually any metadata field stored in master photos, regardless of whether that field is in the Lightroom catalog. Any Filter uses the well-regarded, authoritative, but hard-to-learn ExifTool utility to read fields from the photos.

You can enter any field name recognized by ExifTool—see its documentation for the complete list. Click the magnifying glass 🔎 to to quickly search for a field.

The field name may include an optional ExifTool group prefix (required only when there are multiple fields with the same name). For example, ImageDescription, EXIF:ImageDescription, and IFD0:ImageDescription all refer to the same field.

Any Filter treats every ExifTool field as a string. If the field contains numeric values, use the number comparison operators. For example:

ExifTool Field > number 3 field: Rating

will search the XMP:Rating field for values numerically greater than 3.

ExifTool Field searches the metadata stored in the master photo files or .xmp sidecars on disk, not in the Lightroom catalog. Fields in sidecars take precedence over fields in the raw files themselves.

If you’re searching a field that Lightroom may have modified, you’ll need to ensure that the field in the catalog has been written back to the photo files. Select all the photos and do Metadata > Save Metadata to File, or set the Lightroom option Automatically write changes into XMP in Catalog Settings > Metadata.

Compared to other Any Filter criteria, ExifTool Field is very slow, limited by the speed of the ExifTool utility. ExifTool can process about 50–150 photos per second, depending on the types of photos and the speed of your computer. So to search a catalog with 50,000 photos could take roughly 1000 seconds (17 minutes)!

To speed up the ExifTool Field criterion, Any Filter runs many instances of ExifTool concurrently. By default, if your computer has n virtual processors (threads), Any Filter will run about 1/3 n instances (e.g. 4 instances on 12 virtual processors / 6 cores). You can adjust that number in the Advanced Settings section of File > Plug-in Manager > Any Filter. Use a smaller number if Any Filter searches are making your Lightroom or computer less responsive, a larger number if you want the searches to go faster. But beware that numbers much larger than the default could make your Lightroom or computer difficult to use interactively. On my Macbook Pro with 16 virtual processors and all the photos on a solid-state drive, I’ve found that using 8 ExifTool processes is about twice as fast as 4, while 16 is only about 25% faster than 8.

Lua Code (Advanced)

The Code criterion lets you define custom criteria with Lua scripts (Lightroom and plugins are implemented in the Lua programming language). This requires programming experience and patience.

In the criterian’s code box, enter a boolean Lua expression (not a statement) to be evaluated for each photo. In the fields box, enter the list of photo fields referenced by that expression, separated by commas.

For example, to match photos whose Title is the same as the Caption and non-blank:

fields: Title, Caption code: Title == Caption and Title ~= ""

This example is included with the built-in filters, named Title same as Caption, not blank. For a more advanced example, see the built-in filter Has person keyword but no associated face rectangle, whose script is in anyfilter.lrplugin/Any Filter Includes/person-keywords-no-face-tags.lua. For two more examples, see Capture date this month of any year and Capture date this month and day of any year.

To refer to a field whose name includes spaces and other punctuation, omit the spaces and punctuation, e.g. CollectionSets and DateTimeOriginalCapture. To refer to a metadata field extracted with ExifTool, in the fields box prefix it with an ExifTool group name, e.g. EXIF:ImageDescription and in the code expression refer to it without the colon, e.g. EXIFImageDescription.

The code expression is evaluated in the standard global environment for Lightroom plugins (see Chapter 1 of the Lightroom Classic Programmers Guide). The fields listed in fields are available as global variables in the code expression. In addition, photo contains the Lightroom LrPhoto object for the current photo, catalog contains the current LrCatalog, and Debug is the debugging module from the Lightroom Debugging Toolkit.

You can place your code in a script file and load it with the include function, e.g.

include "myscript.lua"

Use the return statement to return a value from the script. Compared to dofile and require, include is optimized for use in Any Filter.

You can use an absolute or relative file path to the script. For the latter, include looks in the Any Filter Includes subfolder in the Lightroom preferences folder and then in the anyfilter.lrplugin folder. To see the location of the Lightroom preferences folder, in Lightroom do Preferences > Presets > Show All Other Lightroom Presets.

The values bound to the field variables use Any Filter’s internal representations (generally those provided by the Lightroom SDK). Beware that a field missing from the photo is usually represented as nil rather than "". The easiest way to discover these representations is by logging them to the file anyfilter.lrplugin/debug.log, e.g.

Debug.lognpp (photo.path, DateTimeOriginalCapture, Faces)

You can also invoke the debugger via Debug.pause().

Any Filter Speed

Some Any Filters match photos as fast as smart collections, and most will match at least 1500 photos/second,  often many times faster. But if they access develop settings, they could match as slow as 250 photos/second, and if they use ExifTool Field, as slow as 50 photos/second. Any Filter is limited by the speed at which Lightroom supplies plug-ins with photos’ metadata.

Wherever possible, Any Filter uses smart collections internally to speed up matching. For example, to implement Keywords = John, Any Filter first executes Keywords contains John using smart collections (which is very fast) and then further filters the resulting photos to those whose keywords exactly match John.

If your Any Filter is matching too slowly, consider adding smart-collection criteria that will help Any Filter quickly narrow down the set of photos. For example, if you know that the desired photos were captured in the last several months, add a Date/Time Original (Capture) criterion.

See ExifTool Field for performance tips on that criterion in particular.

Using Any Filter > Filter

The Filter command provides a column browser similar to the Library Filter bar’s metadata browser:

Each column displays the values of the chosen field, and clicking a value will display only those photos with that value. Shift-click, Cmd-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) to select additional values in a column.

Click on + to add a column, – to remove it.

Click the drop-down in the upper-left corner to save the current column settings as a preset or invoke a previously defined preset.

The Filter command filters the photos currently visible in the grid and filmstrip. Lightroom doesn’t always notify the plugin when you change the current source (folder or collection) or the Library Filter bar settings—in that case, click Refresh to recompute the columns.

Filter is often slow, due to Lightroom limitations. Lightroom fetches some fields very quickly, others very slowly. In general, if Filter is too slow, use smart collections and the Library Filter bar to narrow down the set of photos you’re examining before invoking Filter.

If there are more than 100 unique values to display in a column, they will be grouped into 100 buckets, sorted numerically or alphabetically. You can change the maximum number of buckets in Settings (⚙). Here’s an example:

1. Filter is examining 1091 photos, with 1042 unique values for file size.

2. Since there are more than 100 unique values, Filter groups them into 100 buckets.

3. The second bucket contains 11 photos,  with file sizes greater than 38,988 bytes and less than or equal to 126,063 bytes.

You can change the column height and width in Settings (⚙).

Using Any Filter > Sort

The Sort command sorts the selected photos by one or more fields and optionally exports the photos and fields to a text file:

You can sort a field in ascending or descending order, and you can force a field to be sorted alphabetically or numerically. (In versions of Lightroom prior to Lightroom 7.2, that option has no effect due to a Lightroom bug.)

If you select the option Save sorted list to collection, the sorted list will be saved in the collection Any Filter Sorted. Be sure to do View > Sort > Custom Order to view the collection in the chosen order.

If you select the option Save sorted list and fields to CSV file, the list of photos and the chosen fields will be saved in the designated text file in comma-separated values format. You can open the file in Excel, Google Sheets, or any other application that understands CSV format.

Sort adds a URL column to the file containing lightroom: URLs. In Excel, use the HYPERLINK function with this column to make clickable links that will take you directly to each photo in Lightroom.

Using Any Filter > By Date

The By Date command lets you quickly filter by dates and date ranges by typing the dates, rather than fussing with the Library Filter bar. When prompted for a date, you can enter the full year/month/day, year/month, or just a year:

For example, to find all photos in 2012, select Date and enter 2012. To find all photos from 1993 to 1999, select Date Range and enter the years 1993 and 1999.

The option Clear current filter clears all previous filter conditions in the Library Filter bar; deselecting that option causes a Date column to be added to the current filter without removing the existing columns.

Using Any Filter > Fix Burst Times

[Fix Burst Times is no longer needed in Lightroom 11. At some point in the last few years, Adobe silently fixed Lightroom’s sorting by capture time. Files that have the same exact time are sorted by file name.]

Many cameras don’t set the capture time’s fractional seconds of bursts when shooting in drive mode, and the bursts often appear out of order in Library. The Fix Burst Times command finds bursts of photos having the same capture time and sets the photos’ fractional seconds to be increasing in the same order as their filenames, e.g. to .0001, .0002, .0003, etc. This properly orders the bursts in Library when sorting by capture time. 

Clicking Save Bursts saves each burst of photos as a collection inside the collection set Any Filter Bursts, letting you preview the bursts before setting their fractional seconds.

We wouldn’t need Fix Burst Times if Lightroom simply sorted by filename when photos’ capture times were equal—please add your me-too vote to this bug report.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows: You can use the standard menu keystrokes to invoke Any Filter commands. For example, ALT+L opens the Library menu, U opens the Plug-in Extras submenu, and S invokes the Any Filter Search command.

To reassign a different final keystroke to an Any Filter menu item, edit the file Info.lua in the plugin folder. Move the & in front of the desired letter in the menu command’s name, changing the name itself if necessary.

To assign a single keystroke as the shortcut, download and install the free, widely used AutoHotkey. 

Mac OS: You can use the standard mechanism for assigning application shortcuts to plugin menu commands. In System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts, select Adobe Lightroom. Click “+” to add a new shortcut, in Menu Title type the name of the menu command preceded by three spaces. For example, if you wanted to assign a key to the Any Filter > Search command, type “<space><space><space>Search”. In Keyboard Shortcut type the desired key or key combination.

Support

Please send problems, bugs, suggestions, and feedback to: ellis-lightroom@johnrellis.com.

I’ll gladly provide free licenses in exchange for reports of new, reproducible bugs.

If Any Filter crashes with an error or produces surprising results, please check the Debug option and re-apply the filter. Then do File > Plug-in Manager, select Any Filter, and in the Troubleshooting panel, click Show Debug Log. That will open File Explorer or Finder with the file debug.log selected—please email me that file.

Issues and limitations:

• Any Filter requires Lightroom 5 or later, Lightroom CC 2015, or Lightroom Classic—it relies on features missing from earlier versions.
• Due to a bug in Mac Lightroom 13.1, the Filter command won’t highlight the selected items in a column when you start the command or when you add a column. Just click on the items you want, and they will be highlighted.
• When using the Filter command, infrequently Lightroom 12 and 13 will fail to display the corresponding thumbnails. When that happens, just click on the second-to last line of the (private AF2) column in the Library Filter bar and then click on the last line—the thumbnails should appear.
• Your saved filters are stored in the file anyfilters.txt in the Lightroom preferences folder. If you’re moving to another computer, be sure to copy that file. Do Preferences > Presets > Show All Other Presets to open File Explorer / Finder on that folder.
• Any Filter can sometimes match photos as slow as 270 photos/second (the develop settings, in particular), even slower for ExifTool Field. See Any Filter Speed for tips on speeding up filters.
• If you’re confused as to why a photo does or does not match an Any Filter, use the Filter command to examine the values of fields referenced by the Any Filter.
• To enable reasonably fast searching, Any Filter uses Lightroom’s built-in search facilities wherever possible. But Lightroom has numerous obscure bugs in its search. If you suspect you’re encountering such a bug, use the Avoid Lightroom bugs option. This will avoid the bugs, at the expense of sometime much slower searching.
• The (private AF1) and (private AF2) columns in the Library Filter bar Metadata browser are not intended to be used directly by users. Rather, Any Filter uses them to display the results of applying a filter quickly. Ideally, it would be hidden from users, but Lightroom doesn’t make that possible. Without these columns, it would take Any Filter many times longer to display very large search results. To see the results of the most recent eight searches under the collection set Any Filter Results, check the option Save results as a collection. 
• When the option Show results using a Library filter is checked, the Last Edit Time of every matching photo is updated to “now” (due to a Lightroom bug).
• The Filter command’s floating window always appears behind the main Lightroom window, on Windows Lightroom when in Window > Screen Mode > Full Screen (and sometimes Full Screen With Menubar). This is caused by a Lightroom bug, and the workaround is to switch to Normal screen mode.
• If you try to use criteria not supported by your version of Lightroom, you’ll get an inelegant plugin error. For example, if you try to use the Lightroom 5 criterion Has Smart Preview in Lightroom 4 or earlier, you’ll get an error.
• Any Filter can’t access the custom metadata fields of most of Jeffrey Friedl’s plugins and those of other developers who share Friedl’s code libraries. They don’t follow the usual (but undocumented) plugin conventions. Use the Search > Plug-in Metadata > Scan Catalog button instead.
• Due to a Lightroom bug, Any Filter cannot always search correctly the location fields (ISO Country Code, Country, State / Province, City, Sublocation) when their values have been automatically added by Lightroom’s address mapping (reverse geo-encoding). Such values appear gray in the Metadata panel. You can work around this by committing these gray values: Click on the field label (e.g. Country) and select the value, changing the field from gray to white. Or use the Commit Locations command of the Any Tag plugin.
• The Folder Details criterion can’t access device folders created by syncing with the Lightroom Cloud (e.g. John's iPhone > Imported Photos), due to a Lightroom bug.
• Any Filter tries to work around a number of bugs in Lightroom’s smart collections and filtering, which are creaky and need significant improvement (one of my motivations for making Any Filter). I fully expect that there are undiscovered Lightroom bugs that Any Filter’s users will trip over. If you suspect such a bug, see above for how to report them. 
• On Windows, when you delete a column in Filter, the size of the window won’t shrink automatically—you’ll have to manually resize the window. (This is caused by a Lightroom bug.)

Version History