Gallery search database

Just curious...I originally joined photo.net to add some Minox

examples because I thought there were very few Minox 35mm examples in

the database when you search for "minox" in the gallery search. It's

been months and my images still don't come up in the list. I have the

equipment listed as Minox GT-S. I'm curious what I need to do to

enable access to the gallery database. Thanks.

Brian McGuiness asked a <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003mO8&unified_p=1">similar question</a> yesterday.

<p>I think the problem is, that the index which the gallery search feature relies on has not been updated in a long, long time. In <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003QKE">another thread about this</a> from this past June, Brian Mottershead explained that "the indexing of photos was disabled after around 100000 photos had been indexed". At that time, Brian was thinking about ways of resuming the indexing without having the system be swamped. I haven't seen anything about that since, however. I suspect that it hasn't been gotten to yet. Effectively, then, the gallery search feature is of limited usefulness: it will only find old stuff...

Interesting. It's a shame that the thought is that many are not useful. If you are looking to buy a particular camera or lens, for instance, they are very useful, as you can see the actual output of said camera, regardless of how good the picture is.

Since all the pictures are actually up, maybe the answer is to sacrifice the indexing -- i.e. all the fields of info must be stored somewhere, like the title, equipment, ratings etc. Maybe the search engine could require you specify in what field to look for your search term (equipment, filters whatever) and actually look at the existing database where the info is kept. It would take a lot longer to search, but it would make everything on the site searchable. Perhaps a seperate box could be in the cluster just to run the searches so it doesn't suck CPU time needed for the rest of the site.

It's a shame more than two thirds the site are inaccessible to searching.