There is a not operator for the search mentioned here, but i think my proposal goes further:
#874

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The way people use a photo catalog is very individual and depending on the circumstances. For a job related assignment, lets say of a stock photo catalog, you probably use search filters to limit the scope of what you are looking for. For this approach, Photoprism already has a great search functionality.

My use-case is different: i am using photoprism to rediscover a very big, very messy personal photo-collection. Photoprism helps me find beautiful memories in this mess of directories, subdirectories, misnamed & untagged files etc.pp. Unfortunately i am missing some functionality in this type of approach, mainly an "exclude" functionality for the catalog view.

Example: Lets imagine you have a personal photo catalog of 50.000 photos from the last 30 years. In the 90's you were a big fan of timelapse video and took thousands of fotos for that purpose, which ended up in your library. Or there is an event that you dont feel like looking at ATM, imagine a funeral of a friend.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would love to have a way to exclude series of photos, optimally "on-the-fly", from the current catalog view. Either by file path, date or other metadata. This could be done before browsing the catalog, better would be if it could be done WHILE browsing the catalog without starting the browsing from scratch. So, an example. Imagine, while scrolling through your 20.000 fotos from 1990-2010 there is a series of 5000 fotos of an experimental timelapse you did in 1991. Basically the browsing ends there, because you cannot skip those fotos and for the way that the endless scrolling is currently implemented, quickly scrolling past 5000 fotos is also not possible, because things will get unbearably slow. If it was possible to just right-click one of these fotos and select one feature of the current foto (i.e. its path) and exclude all items that match this parameter, this would be great. Another, probably easier to implement option would be to reduce the catalog BEFORE browsing, in which case you have to know before that you will have to exclude something.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Adding a "not" operator to the search would make a workaround possible by excluding items (or series of items) from the search results, i.e. "!= (path:"German Film Award" color:magenta)"