20 Ways To Search Your Photos

The Photos app gives you many ways to search through your photos. You can look by person, dates, locations, objects, titles, camera type and so much more. You can also combine these in ways to get interesting results.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you 20+ ways that you can search in the Photos App on your Mac. 
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So when you're using the Photos App one of the best ways to get to a photo that you want to see is to Search for it. But there are so many different ways to search for photos. You probably don't know about them all. So the main thing we're going to use right here is the Search field at the top right. You can use this to search for photos in all sorts of different ways. For instance, you probably have under  People here different people that appear in your photos. Of course you can go into anyone of these, if you already haven't, to confirm additional photos and keep doing that occasionally to make sure that each person is kind of complete. They are listed here, under their name, for every photo they are in. But while you're in your library here you can search for that person. I'll search for myself and you can see I come up with a variety of photos right here in the search results. But click right here. Notice the little person icon with a circle around it. It has 13 next to it and I can see all of the photos that I'm in. If you don't see them all here you can click the See All button and it goes to the complete list. 
Now you can also search for more than one person. So, I'm going to type in Jack here and you can see that it says Jack 2. Jack's actually in more than two photos here but I still have myself there. So when I select this notice it has both names. So you can search for photos that have all the people that you list and you can include mornings as well. 
Now you can also search by Location. So you may search for something like this. Just see photos you've taken at this location. You see the icon there with a little Pin in it. You get these photos here. If there are more than what you can see you get that See All button here as well. But in addition to be able to search for specific locations note that you can actually go to higher levels. So instead of Denver I can search for Colorado and get photos in Colorado. Or I can search for United States and get photos throughout the United States. So you can search for a specific location even down to a neighborhood and you can then go bigger for like a city, state, or country. 
Now you can also search by Dates. So if you want to do something simple like, for instance, search by year I could search for 2019 here and just look at all the photos taken that year. But you could also do by month. So I could do say June but I could also do say June 2019 and you could see it gives you this little calendar icon here so you can narrow things down really quickly. You can do a Date Range as well. So I could search say June 1, 2019 and then use the word, to, and then say July 31, 2019. Then as long as it comes up here as a choice you can select it. Now I get everything in this range. 
You can also search for a photo taken a specific number of days ago. So normally you might do something like say 7 days or 14 days. But in this case I've got a lot of old photos here in this sample collection so I'll do 237 days and I'll get one photo that was taken 237 days ago. Something more reasonable might be to type something like Last 30 Days. I don't have anything in here for that. Let's try Last 330 Days. Let's try Last 530 days and I get all the photos taken within the last 530 days. Last 1030 days, etc. 
You can also search by Titles, Captions, or Descriptions. Let's select this photo here and I'm going to do i for information and you could see I can add a Caption. I can also add a Title. So I can call this Penguins. I could say Penguins at the Denver Zoo. Like that. Now I could search for that, I could search for Penguins. It shows up in Titles, you could see. I can search for Denver Zoo and it will show up there because that is in the description. So you can add Titles and Captions to your photos if you want and search for those. 
You can also search by Type. So, for instance, when I want to find Portrait photos I can search for Portrait and you can see it shows up here with a little special icon next to it. It shows now all my portrait photos. I can search for Pano, panoramas. I've got three of those. I could search for Selfies. That's taken with the front camera. You can also search by Album Names. So for my albums here I've got several including one called Vacation. I can search for that and you can see it's going to come up with Albums right there. Of course one of the default Albums you've got is Favorite. Now what's the difference between searching for Favorites and just actually going to Favorites? Well, it's because you can combine things. So, for instance, if you had a couple of hundred photos marked Favorites, you could search Favorites and then also a person or location or date range. 
Another thing you can do is search by Camera type. If I search iPhone notice it lists all of the different iPhones that I've used to take photos. You could do the same thing with other types of cameras. So I've got two different Canon cameras that I've had over the years. I could search for just pictures taken with a specific camera. Again, you can combine these. That's the key to the Search. Some of these don't seem to make sense until you think about the fact that you can combine them. So you could search for say Pictures you took of your spouse using a certain camera. 
Now, of course, the big thing you could search for is content inside the photo. So, for instance, if I searched for flowers, you could see I could click Flowers here and it will actually identify these flowers. I didn't use a title with the word flowers in it. I didn't use a description or caption or anything like that. It just recognizes that there are flowers in these photos. Lots of different things like boats or sailing boat here that it recognizes. Sunsets. So lots of different things.
Now some searches you have to go beyond the little search box here. Go to File and New Smart Album and this allows you to do a search in a different way. We'll call the Smart Album, Test, because we're going to keep reusing it. You can setup this Test Smart Album to do a search by combining many things. Like, for instance, you could search by the lens that you're using. If you bring the Dropdown up here it will actually show you all the different lenses that are recorded throughout your libraries. You don't have to guess what a lens is called. So I could, of course, search for an iPhone model with the lens but also I've got things like the different lenses on different cameras here. Like two different lenses here on my Canon. You can do the same thing with all sorts of different settings like aperture, whether the flash is on, the focal length ISO, shutter speed. 
Now a lot of times people try to use Smart Albums to do a custom search and they can't find what they want. Well that stuff is hidden here under Photo. Choose Photo and then Is and then you have a lot of options here that you would expect to find on the left instead. For instance, you could do photo is RAW and see the Raw photos that you've taken. Or ProRes or HDR. You could also go down here at the bottom and see Tag with GPS. So you can see photos that are tagged with GPS but you can also change this to Is Not. So if you take most of your photos with an iPhone and they are tagged with GPS, but occasionally you take photos with an another camera that doesn't have GPS you can use this, create the Smart Album here, and then this gives you a list of all the photos that don't have location. So then you can select them. Go to Info and assign your own location to them. Now you can see here I still have this Test Smart Album. I can Control click, two finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse. Select Edit Smart Album. Now I can reuse this Smart Album. I don't have to keep recreating Smart Albums to do some of these special searches. Notice with the Smart Albums you could add new things like this and match All or Any of these. So you   can create complex searches using the things here.
Another you can do is you can go to Person and it can be Includes, like that, or Does Not Include. So, for instance, I could say I want to have Person includes Me, includes Jack, and I get 2. But what if I want to have just the photos of Jack by himself. Don't include Me. I could say Does Not Include and now I get those photos. So that's just one example of how you can use Smart Albums to create clever search results.
Another thing you can do is go to Album and then you can go Is Any, right. That's the Default. Or you do Is and you can pick an Album. But you could also do Is Not Any. What you're going to get now is all of the photos that are not in any album. So if you're in the habit of putting every photo you take in just some album or another you can find all the ones that are not assigned to an album this way. Then go and add them to Albums. 
Now I'm going to show you one last tip that involves searching and finding more than the search results. For instance, let's say that you're on a trip and you remember taking a picture of a waterfall. But after you took that picture of a waterfall you took another really cool photo. How do you search for that photo? Well, if you search for something by person, by a description, by anything, you can find it and let's say you find the picture. Ah, this is the one! You can Control click, two finger click, or right click on this and then select Show In All Photos. This will take you to your All Photos List where it shows you that photo. So now you can find the photos that are just after or just before it very easily. I use this technique to find a photo all the time.
Another tip for you, when you searching in Smart Albums, you'll notice that there's no way to search by location but actually you can. Use Text. If you search for Text Is, search for a location and that's a way to actually do a Smart Album using a Location and then you can add on to that something like, you know, person includes to make a more complex search result. 
There are lots of other ways to combine searches both in the Search Box in the upper right and in Smart Albums. Remember you don't need to keep Smart Albums around. You can just create one, use it to do a search, and then easily get rid of it or just reuse that same Smart Album for any kind of special search you want to do in the future. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “20 Ways To Search Your Photos”

Darrell

1 year ago

Great tips on searching! I have a related question: often I save images from the internet to Photos (mostly because there’s no option I’ve found for saving them to Files). They show up in strange places when I search by “Year” since they mostly have the current date in their metadata. Do you know of a way to save these images to Files that I’m missing, so my Photos are actually my photographs I’ve taken instead of a mix of them and images from the internet?

Gary Rosenzweig

Darrell: You should definitely save Internet photos (photos that you didn't take) as files in the Finder, not to your Photos library. Not sure what you mean by "mostly because there’s no option I’ve found for saving them to Files" as that's the default on a Mac. They should go to the Downloads folder.

Sorry, Gary, I should got my wires crossed. The option issue I referred to is what I experience in iOS when saving photos. Thanks.

Comments Closed.

20 Ways To Search Your Photos

Comments: 3 Responses to “20 Ways To Search Your Photos”

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