I am building an image catalog and I have an advanced search page which lists search fields that are related to images, such as image title, current location etc and search fields that are related to artists, such as artist name, artist date of birth etc.

I have an image view layout and artist view layout with artist info a portal to the image table displaying all images by that artist.

I want to make the advanced search page so that the default layout displayed after a search is the image view, unless any of the artist search fields are filled.

Please advice on how to go about this. I have the image info and the artist info in separate tables.

You may have to use global fields for your search . When the user clicks on the button to search, navigate to a layout in browse mode and ask him to select values in the global fields. Keep a button "Search" or "Find" on this layout which would internally go to the find mode, copy the values from the global fields to the actual fields and do a find. If there are records matching the criteria then check if the user has entered any search criteria in the global field for artist, if yes then go to the artist layout.

The extra overhead would be to create global fields and writing the find script. To avoid it, you can create two buttons, search on artist and search on images and have two layouts. This would be easier to maintain. Or when the user clicks on a search button you can show a message if he wants to search on artist or image.