Hi,

My photos have tags introduced with IDImager. Some of these tags consist of two or three words (like "history museum" or "John Smith"). I have uploaded these photos on ZenPhoto (theme used zpArdoise 1.4.0), and the tags appear neatly underneath the image.

However if they are clicked, none of these multi-word tags seems to lead to a valid search. All the searches return zero results.

I have tried in Options >> Search several combinations:
Tags PARTIAL and EXACT
and each of these in combination with the three options below
Treat spaces as: SPACE, then OR, then AND.

I have exhausted all the 6 above combinations -- but to no avail.

All my searches of multiple-word tags result in zero hits. Frustrating!

(And of course, single-word tags are fine. And so are the manually entered searches of any of the elements of the multi-word tags.)

Is there any other setting that I might be ignoring?

For me is working in 2 ways:

1. With PARTIAL tags and treat spaces as AND.
2. With treat spaces as SPACE.

IMHO both methods have nasty consequences.
The first in case you need to refine your search, because the already used AND operator create problems with the new search, where a new AND is used by default.
The second is counterintuitive for normal searches.

It would be nicer to treat spaces as SPACE for tags only..

Or you can just quote things that you want to treat as single entities. Tags are no different from any other search except for the ability to make an exact match. The latter is not practical or even useful for, say, descriptions.

While I totally agree with you about normal searches, where the most intuitive behavior for an "average" user is to treat spaces as AND, I think that tags are special beasts. They are like atoms, and you can't split atoms without generating a chain reaction (lol).
I understand that the wonderful search engine of zenphoto includes tags and other things in the same code, and I have no idea about how complicated could be to treat tags in a special way, but I still think that people can be confused if tags are splitted in searches..

For "average" users you probably want to avoid multi-word tags in the first place.

That's what I'm going to do in my website, but I'm not sure if things are like you are saying.
The first version of zenphoto I installed, a few years ago, was treating tags as atoms. I had a tag Young & Rubicam and even the "&" character was not a problem when you clicked on the tag.
I didn't notice the change in search engine when it happened, I don't even know which version of zenphoto included that change.
In many cases multi-word tags are more useful and intuitive for an average user if they are still treated as atoms, at least when you click on them.
But of course it's your choice, and I can live without multi-word tags

I don't remember the change date as well and the reason was if I recall correctly because of other issues. Sbillard will be able to tell more.

A suggestion to keep multipart tags: Try using a divis or an underscore(something-else(something_else) and use the tag suggest plugin for the search form to give your visitors a guide.

Yes, I've already used a divis for some tags (like still-life) and it works, that's a good idea. I'll try the suggestion plugin too.
Or may be I can try enveloping in quotes multi-words tags, eventually preventing the quotes from dislpay in tags with some javascript or php in my custom theme.

I believe your memory is faulty. Having an ampersand in your tag text has never worked without quoting the string. Of course, if you clicked on a "tag" that would have been a link generated by Zenphoto, so the string WOULD have been quoted. Things are different when someone types the search. They may not know to quote. Maybe try the tag_suggest plugin.

Well, there must have been some misunderstanding.
I'm talking about clicking on a tag link from the beginning of my posting in this topic. Actually, in current version of zenphoto, when you click on a tag link the request is processed by the search engine in the same way as when you enter manually the tag in the search box, that's the reason why I consider counterintuitive the behavior of tags...

BTW I've tried to envelope tags in quotes, they are displayed in quotes in tag cloud and under images, but they are non processed in quotes by the search engine when you click on a tag link.

And I was not talking of the processing. It is what is processed. If zenphoto generates a link to a tag which contains characters that are search operators or spaces it will quote them. The quoting is required or the string will be incorrectly interpreted.

Do you think it's possible to generate quoting for multi-words tags when the search is called from a tag link?
I repeat that I can live without this feature and I am not bothering you for a personal necessity, but I really think that it could be an improvement for "user friendly" behavior of zenphoto.

It is quite easy at the end, in latest official build I tried replacing
html_encode(getSearchURL($key, ..cut..
with
html_encode(getSearchURL('"'.$key.'"', ..cut..
In template-function, line 3483 function printAllTagsAs(...)

It worked on my local developing server. I immagine it works the same way in function printTags(...)

You should create a trouble ticket. Be sure to detail the conditions leading to the issue.

Ok, I opened the ticket. I hope everything is clear, anyway I included a link to this topic.