Search Your Photo Library For Objects

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Did you know you could search in your Photos Library for things in the photos. This feature has been around for years but a lot of Mac and iPhone users still don't know that you can do this. Let me show you.

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So in the Photos app you've got a search field here at the top right. You can search for a variety of things. For instance you can search for any word in a title if you've assigned a title to a photo. You can search for a keyword that you've assigned. You can search for dates. You can search for locations. It'll use the GPS meta tag on the photo to find something by location. You can also search for an object. Something you haven't ever indicated that is in the photo because the Photos app actually looks at the photos and tries to identify things in them. It does this right on your Mac. So this isn't some service that Apple has. This is something built into the Photos app on your Mac. It's also built into the Photos app on your iPhone and iPad.

So, for instance, if I search for waterfall, you see I get two results here. The second one is saying it found the word waterfall in a title. So something I assigned. But the first one says Category. If found four photos which it thinks has a waterfall in them. I click on that and sure enough it correctly identified a waterfall in those four photos. So you can try searching for all sorts of other things. For instance, beach. You can see it found two. I can search for sunset and it found six. I can search for boat and it found ten. It's not perfect. If I type balloon notice it gives me the category hot air balloon. So I say okay show me the hot air balloons and it gives me something that's not a hot air balloon. But it's close. You can see why it made that mistake.

You can search for multiple things. So, for instance, I'm going to search for water and then space boat. You can see one of the things it gives me here is water comma boat. I can use that to get things that include both of those. You can also combine it with other things. So locations for instance. So I can do New Jersey and you can see it puts that as a state, and then I can say boat and you can see it says New Jersey comma boat. So state and category. So it found one that is in that location and also has that object.

There's no definitive list of categories that Photos looks for. As a matter of fact the first version in High Sierra seemed to have some more abstract things. You could search for smile or you could search for anger and it would come up with some things. But I'm not noticing those now.

In Catalina there seems to be some other abstract things. Like you could search for adventure and find some results. You could kind of get a look at what some of the categories are by just typing a letter. If I just type the letter e it gives me some suggestions. A lot of those are category suggestions and I can go and jump to one of those. But you only get ones where you actually have a result. So it's not giving me all of the e's here because it's only giving me ones where there is at least one result for it.

In Catalina it looks like you get fewer suggestions than you do in Mojave and earlier versions of Photos.

This also works great with Siri. Whether or not you have Photos running you can use Siri and it will do the search for you. "Show me pictures of waterfalls". You see it comes up with that same result. This works just as well in iOS. So here I am on my iPhone and I can go to Search and I can do the same thing here and get those results. I could also just use Siri. "Show me photos of waterfalls".

Now don't expect perfection here. It can't find every object. It's not going to be 100% accurate. But it's a great tool for narrowing things down. For instance if you travel to some town somewhere and you went to the beach and took a whole bunch of photos at that beach, chances are if you searched for beach and the name of that town you're going to very quickly find a couple of those photos. You'll be able to zero in on that moment or the album where you have those photos and find what you want without having to have to set keywords and titles and things in advance. It makes it so much easier to navigate around any huge photos collection like the one I have where I take tons of pictures. Often I need to go and find a specific photo or type of photo this type of search is fantastic for that.