TIP of the day: What you can't do with a media search.

MJ. Smith

When we search media our primary search fields are tag and title. Unlike many search elements these fields are nearly invisible to us. In this post I illustrate how invisible they are and show ways to make educated guesses as to their values so that you can build effective searches.

1. Many of our media resources are not in resource type:media but are spread throughout our resources. Doing a search on tag, title for values such as the and sorting by count will give you a sense as to where in your collection media is found.

2. To test the search items, I choose a typical non-media resource and select a particular media item as my test object.

3. In many cases, a right-click Context Menu will have an option to run a search. Observing how that search is built is a good way to learn to use searches. But here, the Context Menu only adds the media credits as searching on the image title generates a simple text search for the title.

4. On the other hand, a right click Context Menu on the image itself generates no search options at all. And note that the right side of the Context Menu offers no information as to the content of Search Fields - in contrast to the growing exposure of datatypes in this section.

5. When doing a search on the search fields tag and title, the caption of the image is not found.

6.However, if I do a media search on the same text, my test image is found.

7. However, a basic search limited to tag and title on a phrase from the caption does find a hit - multiple hits in fact including my test case. This implies that the title is not a simple copy of the caption but does include key words from the caption.

8. Similarly a media search for "prayer book" finds a variety of matches, including my test case.