search features could use improvements

Greetings,

I've found a lot forum topics dating for years regarding the search features of Gallery 3 with very little changes and/or solutions to issues. It would seem as though a robust search feature would be important for site usability and customer access in order to find and purchase photos. I use Gallery 3 mostly for posting and selling event photos where galleries can sometimes contain over 1,000 images. Here are some issues I've been having:

1. Inability to search within subgalleries. I have multiple main galleries set up with subgalleries within. For instance I have a Cycling Events folder, with many folders located within that folder. When viewing the subfolders and trying to simply search for tags within those folders it searches for all photos on the site. I found forum topics dating back many years regarding this issue but haven't seen a change or solution.

2. Smart Search would be nice to choose how to search for images (even within the specific folder as noted above). A user should be able to choose by keyword, name, photo title, time range, race bib number, etc.

3. The ability to view through the images found in a search. Say for example a racer searches for their bib number located in the keywords, the search locates all photos matching that criteria, but once you click on that photo it takes you to the location of that photo within the gallery it exists in. It should instead create a virtual gallery containing only photos that meet the search criteria.

These features would really improve a customer's experience when trying to find themselves among hundreds of other photos. Are there currently proposed changes for the Gallery 3 search functions or any modules I'm unaware of that address these issues?

Thanks.

@yooperjb:

#1 sounds simple enough. You'd need to add a parameter to check for (maybe a checkbox?) that would add a field to the query (to only return results that have the parent ID of the current location); it could get a bit tricky though (e.g. if you want to include results for the subalbums of the current item, and the sub-subalbums etc).

#2 sounds great! but is more complicated than I can even think about right now. If you get started, I'm willing to help where I can.

#3 has been addressed in the forum before (not sure if a coding solution was already proposed with it). Time's short right now, but I'll search for it later.