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Warning- legacy tags not ignored in search


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Just a heads up which may help some.

Before AIM was refined, I copied and pasted a lot of tags via Word and found that many copied over with a stray bullet point character  (• , alt 7) in front of the tag.

I carelessly assumed that this was ignored in search, but yesterday I found out that the entire tag is ignored if there's no space between the bullet and the tag.

I have hundreds of affected images so a manual fix is out of the question, but MS are sending me a spreadsheet so I can do a find and replace.

 

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8 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Zounds! :mellow:

 

I imagine that I still have a few old images with flotsam and jetsam -- e.g. orphan brackets, etc. -- left over from the switch to the new AIM. Not sure how they affect search results.

I “think” I got rid of all of those, John. I don’t want to revisit that nightmare again. If there’s any (brackets,etc) left, it’s because I worked so long every evening that my eyes crossed.

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14 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Zounds! :mellow:

 

I imagine that I still have a few old images with flotsam and jetsam -- e.g. orphan brackets, etc. -- left over from the switch to the new AIM. Not sure how they affect search results.

I'd check them and do a test search. I know commas and the like are disregarded, but I wouldn't chance it. I had some images missing from a specific search because of the bullets, that's how I found out. If you do have stray characters keeping images out of searches, you may never find out from Measures.

This was largely a problem I created myself by copying and pasting from AIM- if you didn't do that you're probably OK, but there are probably a few who did, because I remember mentioning the workaround here.

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8 hours ago, spacecadet said:

I'd check them and do a test search. I know commas and the like are disregarded, but I wouldn't chance it. I had some images missing from a specific search because of the bullets, that's how I found out. If you do have stray characters keeping images out of searches, you may never find out from Measures.

This was largely a problem I created myself by copying and pasting from AIM- if you didn't do that you're probably OK, but there are probably a few who did, because I remember mentioning the workaround here.

 

Fortunately, I didn't do any copying and pasting, so no bullets. I think I've fixed most of the culprits, but every once in awhile I unearth an old image with junk left over from the brackets, etc. business of long ago.

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2 hours ago, spacecadet said:

All done and dusted.

Quite glad I did it, there were nearly 17,000 stray bullets:o

How did you remove 17,000 bullets that quickly? I’d be doing it for months. Didn’t you have to open each and every image in AIM to fix them? Or was it as simple of doing a search for (.) in AIM and removing that at once?

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6 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

How did you remove 17,000 bullets that quickly? I’d be doing it for months. Didn’t you have to open each and every image in AIM to fix them? Or was it as simple of doing a search for (.) in AIM and removing that at once?

I tried that for a few dozen images before realising exactly what you did- it would take ages even if I could find all the stray characters- search doesn't find them. So I asked MS if they could do it, and the reply was that they couldn't, but they could send me a spreadsheet of my entire metadata and I could do a find and replace (replaced with a space character) in Excel. it took seconds. I sent the sheet back and they'll replace my old metadata with the new version.

It occurs to me that this thread title didn't make a lot of sense. Or perhaps it was so intriguing that you clicked on it to see what the gibberish was about..

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1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

 

I tried that for a few dozen images before realising exactly what you did- it would take ages even if I could find all the stray characters- search doesn't find them. So I asked MS if they could do it, and the reply was that they couldn't, but they could send me a spreadsheet of my entire metadata and I could do a find and replace (replaced with a space character) in Excel. it took seconds. I sent the sheet back and they'll replace my old metadata with the new version.

It occurs to me that this thread title didn't make a lot of sense. Or perhaps it was so intriguing that you clicked on it to see what the gibberish was about..

Yes, the title was intriguing! Also, having gone through 5000 images one by one to fix the broken phrases and remove other trash, anything related is interesting to me. 

Thanks for the clarification.

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The stray bullets - eek!- happen when your selection is just a bit wider than the actual keywords.

Only if the formatting stays with your selection and if the page you use in between supports the formatting -in this case bullet points- those will be copied back into AIM.

One solution is to use something like WordPad in between or to copy/paste without formatting. Usually under Paste Special, sometimes with a shortcut like Ctrl+Shift-V on a PC.

On the Mac people usually use Option+Shift+Command+V, which is slightly different: it pastes and matches style in stead of removing it. Not always a good idea, like here. Best option on a Mac: TextEdit (on every Mac since OSX) lets you work on a document without formatting (Command-Shift-T).

 

wim

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9 hours ago, wiskerke said:

The stray bullets - eek!- happen when your selection is just a bit wider than the actual keywords.

Only if the formatting stays with your selection and if the page you use in between supports the formatting -in this case bullet points- those will be copied back into AIM.

One solution is to use something like WordPad in between or to copy/paste without formatting. Usually under Paste Special, sometimes with a shortcut like Ctrl+Shift-V on a PC.

On the Mac people usually use Option+Shift+Command+V, which is slightly different: it pastes and matches style in stead of removing it. Not always a good idea, like here. Best option on a Mac: TextEdit (on every Mac since OSX) lets you work on a document without formatting (Command-Shift-T).

 

wim

I think I followed this advice of yours originally, but didn't revisit what I'd already done. I then perpetuated it by copying between images.

Anyway they're all gone now.

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