Getting an accurate list of approved images

picu has a convenient method of providing you with a list of filenames of all of the approved images.

Copy filenames by the click of a button
Copy filenames by the click of a button

By copying and pasting this string of filenames into Lightroom’s library filter search field you should get exactly those images. (Make sure to select „Filename“ and „Contains“.)

Lightroom’s library filter
Lightroom’s library filter

By default picu gives you the filenames separated by a space.

This however doesn’t work for some photographers, who name their files ending in sequence numbers, eg. flower–1.jpg, flower–2.jpg, …, flower–10.jpg.

Entering flower–1 in Lightroom’s search field it will show them flower–1.jpg as well as flower–10.jpg (and 11, 12, …).

(Aside: This problem won’t occur if you use leading zeros in your filenames, like flower-0001.jpg and flower-0010.jpg.)

To accommodate photographers that use this kind of file naming we introduced a way of customizing the separator in version 0.9.2:

Define a constant

Just add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define( ‘PICU_FILENAME_SEPARATOR’, ‘. ’ );

Add your custom separator between the last two quotes.

In the code example above the separator consists of a point and a space, which would result in „flower–1. flower–2. flower–3. …“.

Instead of a point you could also write .jpg. But as many photographers only keep raw files in their library (with different file extensions) a point is actually all that’s needed for Lightroom to determine the end of a filename.


There is actually a second way to do the same thing. It is targeted more towards developers:

Use our picu_filename_separator filter, eg. by adding the following code snippet to your theme’s functions.php.

add_filter( ‘picu_filename_separator’, ‘my_custom_filename_separator’, 10, 2 );

function my_custom_filename_separator( $divider ) {
    return ‘. ’;
}

Either way, we hope this improvement is useful in your personal workflow and allows you to stick to your specific convention of naming image files.

If you have any questions, we’re here to help.


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