In the art gallery, it would be useful to be able to select whether or not to search in the author's name :: e.g. just now I searched for "frogm" to try to find pictures whose names or notes mentioned frogman or frogmen, but it found 114 images unrelated to diving made by someone called "Frogman", and only one other image.

It on our list to beef up Searching. Our current plans would cover exactly what your asking for here. Thanks.

One useful feature might be a special character in the search term which means "but ignore": for example. when searching the art gallery for "diver" (for underwater scenes), the searcher also picked up "divert" and "diversion" and "diverse" and "Sir Bedivere". Another feature is the exclude term. They can be used in the Alta Vista web searcher, where a minus sign as a prefix means "do not list any web page that contains this word". An example is, if someone is looking for information about jaguars (the animal), but does not want to be swamped in references to Jaguar Cars.

Yeah, I've always liked AltaVista's search string rules. Thanks for the feedback on the search.

But you've gotta admit, Frogman's got a great gallery. :)

While you allready said changes for search option are on your list - may I place a suggestion here? The galleries are application based, so I think it might be fine if you could include a genre/theme search, and enable mebers to add such info to thier images if they want. I.e. genres like science fiction, fantasy, portaits, landscapes and so on. It would give members a choice to look at picture themes they like (and avoid others they don't). The current search isn't strong on this. (move to comunity ideas if you want)