Bring back the search feature, please.

I want to see a poem I posted four or five years ago. In the past, I would do a search and ask for my own gallery, in a date range, in only the Writer's Gallery, with no genre. Poof. I get only what I want to see.

There are nearly 2700 entries in my gallery. Did I already use the title I'm thinking of? In the past, I could do a search in only my gallery and find out if I'd used a specific word in a title or if my seemingly original thought was actually original! I don't give a crap if somebody else has used the word, I only care if I'm repeating myself.

I was talking on the telephone to another Renderosity artist the other day, and we were talking about artistic influence. I mentioned to him that my photography had been strongly influenced by a series of four or five photographs that someone had posted in 2007 or 2008, and I remembered what the subject was. We were able to find the photographs by doing a search in that artist's gallery, in a limited time frame, with a couple of key words. Poof. There they were.

It's my birthday, and I know people are posting images for me. Not everybody puts my name in the title, not everybody posts in the galleries I check every day. I do a search for all of Renderosity for the past week, with my name and user name as key words. There you go. Now I haven't missed anyone's work who was kind enough to think of me and make a piece of art for my birthday.

I want to make a new album with only pictures of ... oh ... Mount Rainier or something. I know when I've posted pictures of Mount Rainier in the past, I've used a few key words. In order to populate the album, I would do a search with those key words, and up would come the images I knew were scattered throughout my gallery of the mountain. Now I can edit those images and add them to my album. Again, I don't care if anyone else has posted pictures of Mount Rainier. I know there are oodles of images on Renderosity of that particular mountain. I just want to make an album, not review other people's images.

I probably used the old search feature once or twice a week, every week, every month, every year, since 2007.

I can't scroll through page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page in my gallery hoping to find what I'm looking for. I don't have the time, and we don't live in a city where we have endless WiFi. We pay for the data we use. I don't want to have to decide if what I want to see is worth so many kb or mb of data, and if it's worth the extra $15 it's going to cost me to use all that data, loading and reloading all those pages.

In order to do a test, I scrolled down three or four pages, clicked something, backed up, hoping that I would be back where I was. You know ... I think after scrolling and waiting and loading all those pages, I may have found what I wanted, but it also may be on the next page. So I check an image. Back up. Am I where I left off? No, I am not. I'm at the bottom of page 1 again. If I had finally found what I was looking for on page 24, I don't think I'm going to have the patience (or the data) to re-load all that work in order to look at the next thing that might be what I wanted to check.

Just in case you seriously thought nobody would miss it ...

Tara

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."  ...  Robert Capa