Finding Assets using PowerSearch
Your Local Search Monster
Searching is one of the most versatile features of Just-Snips.
All search is organized based on a PowerSearch, a collection of filter definitions that an asset must pass / not pass to be a match.
Filter Dimensions
PowerSearches offer multiple ways to find assets, all based on properties of the assets in the population.
The PowerSearch editor allows you to decide which of these properties you want to look for.
Text Properties
The text filter will search for the given fragment of text in all text properties:
name,
description,
copyright,
origin,
contents (in text assets for now), and
tags.
The search can be case-invariant (the standard) or case-sensitive. It can also require the search fragment to be the whole contents of the given property, or a part of it.
Date Properties
Searching for assets by date has to focus on one of the three dates an asset can have: creation, addition, and last change.
The search can define either a after or a before date, or both.
It can also use the weekday of these dates. The search dialog will show which weekdays are present in the asset population to make life a bit easier.
Lastly, you can search by day, month, year, or week separately, each with a range.
PowerSearches can find all assets that were created:
- on Xmas day:
day 24,month 12- on the first monday of a month
Weekday Monday,day 1-7- on all Friday 13ths
weekday Friday,day 13
If this is of interest, the inclusion of time-of-day is a possible future enhancement.
Color Properties
You can search for the scanned colors of the asset:
- Only Black & White: will search for assets that have only black and white as colors
- Only Grayscale: will search for assets that have only grays as colors
- RGB: will compare the color you search for with the asset colors. If the distance is within your specified tolerance, the asset matches the search
- RGB Detailed: will search with a separate distance for the Red Green Blue components of the RGB spectrum
- HSL: will search for the given hue, with separate distances for hue, saturation, and luminosity
Size Properties
The asset size filter is based on the byte size of the asset file itself, or the dimensions of the asset.
For all of those, you can specify and lower and/or an upper bound.
The size parameter can be given in human magnitudes like KB or MB.
You can also search for portrait, landscape or square assets only.
MIME Properties
You can limit the result to only assets of a certain MIME type. For convenience, the search display shows you how many assets in the population are of this MIME type.
User Properties
You can search for specific users, not free-form names. All users present in the asset population are shown to pick from. You can search for either the creator or the last editor of the asset.
Geo Properties
You can filter assets by their geo location, if one is defined. You can either pick a location on a map, or provide a street address to find its coordinates.
Misc Properties
You can limit the search results to only favorites, or quickpicks, or cloning masters/clones.
You can also limit the search to only suspected potential duplicates of assets.
You can also invert the PowerSearch, then assets that do not match the criteria are the result.
Saved PowerSearches
If you use the local PowerSearch ? to quickly search your assets, that PowerSearch is not saved automatically. You can expressedly save it to the library is works in and retrieve it later.
This is particularly handy when you do the same search often.
You can also copy a search to a different library, or create a base library with all your standard searches and create a copy of that for a new project.
Using PowerSearches across Libraries
One particular feature of PowerSearch is that is can be stored as a separate item in the folder tree.
Individual PowerSearches (not tied to a library) can search across libraries. By default, they will only look into libraries that are in the same folder as themselves.
You can instruct the PowerSearch to delve into the folder structure and scan all libraries, either siblings or in sub-folders.
You can also pick a subset of those libraries if you want to limit which libraries to search will scan.