Filtering by date in Lightroom

Question

In Lightroom 3, using the metadata filter with one of the columns set to Date in hierarchical mode, I can easily narrow down the date range. I can easily get all photos from 2010, or all October 2010 photos, or all 31 October 2010 photos. But how do I get all photos taken on 31 October regardless of the year? The only way I could find is to manually click on 31 Oct 2010, then Ctrl+Click 31 Oct 2009, Ctrl+Click 31 Oct 2008, and so on. Isn't there a faster way? What if I want all photos between 30 Oct and 2 Nov on any year? Ctrl+clicking all those dates would take forever.

Answer 1

I have not found a direct way to do this, however using a Collection one can come pretty close. Using a Smart Collection one can create multiple rules to define what is included in a collection of images. To create a Smart Collection follow these steps:

1. In the Library Module press the + (add) button in the Collections section, typically on the left side.
2. From the popup menu that appears select " Create Smart Collection..." (In my Mac version there is not a keyboard short cut that I know of)
3. In the Name section of the dialog box, enter the Name you want to use to identify it
4. The Set dropdown box typically if populated with Smart Collections by default, but you can add additional ones if desired.
5. Under the Match "X" of the following rules dropdown box select "Any"
6. On the first rule field dropdown box (typically defaults to "Rating") select "Capture Date"
7. In the selection criteria dropdown (typically defaults to "is) either specify that the capture date is equal to or in a range of dates
8. Enter the date information as appropriate
9. Then click the add button at the end of the rule section click the add button to add the next rule to evaluate.

You will have to add the rules for all of the years you are looking for to this Smart Collection, but once it is done once you have it for future use.

There are other approaches but this one might be the least cumbersome to create.

Answer 2

Bradford's anser is a good idea, so I accepted his answer. But adding a separate rule for each year in Lightroom takes too many clicks for my taste.

I've found that if I right-click on a smart collection in Lightroom 3 I can choose "export smart collection settings" to save the smart collection's rules into an .lrsmcol file. That turns out to be a text file that is easily edited with any text editor. So I created a smart collection in Lightroom that selects the photos for 2009 and 2010, exported it, opened it in a text editor, copy/pasted additional critera for 2000 to 2008, and reimported it.

The quickest way to make your own smart collection for filtering dates is probably to paste the code below into a text editor, search-and-replace 10-31 and 11-03 with your own dates, save as an .lrsmcol file, and import that into Lightroom. I haven't tested whether Lightroom always uses the yyyy-mm-dd format or whether it uses it because I have Windows configured to use that date format.

s = {
    id = "C6E098B5-18A6-409D-8920-068C94DC65B0",
    internalName = "Date range every year",
    title = "Date range every year",
    type = "LibrarySmartCollection",
    value = {
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2010-10-31",
            value2 = "2010-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2009-10-31",
            value2 = "2009-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2008-10-31",
            value2 = "2008-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2007-10-31",
            value2 = "2007-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2006-10-31",
            value2 = "2006-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2005-10-31",
            value2 = "2005-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2004-10-31",
            value2 = "2004-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2003-10-31",
            value2 = "2003-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2002-10-31",
            value2 = "2002-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2001-10-31",
            value2 = "2001-11-03",
        },
        {
            criteria = "captureTime",
            operation = "in",
            value = "2000-10-31",
            value2 = "2000-11-03",
        },
        combine = "union",
    },
    version = 0,
}