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Find any photo

Four ways to reach the photo you're picturing — type its name or a keyword, describe it in plain English, filter by rating and camera, or save the whole search as a smart collection that keeps itself up to date.

The search field at the top of the grid looks in more places than a filename search. A single query matches against, all at once:

  • the photo's filename and folder path;
  • its keywords, anywhere in your keyword tree;
  • its AI tags (see below);
  • and, if you've built the index, its meaning (see Search by meaning).

To search your whole catalogue rather than the current folder, select All Photographs in the sidebar first.

Exact match

Wrap a query in "double quotes" to switch to an exact match — it matches whole filenames, keywords and tags only (no partial words) and skips the meaning-based pass. Useful when a loose search returns too much.

Browsing by keyword

Your keyword tree lives in the sidebar. Click any keyword to show every photo tagged with it. Keywords come across intact when you import from Lightroom, and you add or edit them in the Metadata panel and menu.

AI tags

Library ▸ Auto-Tag Photos with AI… runs Apple's on-device image classifier over your library and records what it recognises as searchable tags — so a photo of a dog becomes findable even if you never keyworded it. The tags are kept as their own internal index, separate from your hand-made keyword tree, and searched alongside it. Turn on View ▸ Show AI Keywords to see them listed (dimmed, below your real keywords); they're read-only.

It's entirely on-device — nothing is uploaded. Its vocabulary is fixed (around 1,300 words), so it may know a photo as "vehicle" rather than "car"; that gap is exactly what meaning-based search closes.

Search by meaning

Meaning-based (semantic) search lets you type what a photo shows — "kids on a beach at sunset", "red bicycle against a wall" — and ranks your library by how well each image matches, even with no matching keyword or filename. It's powered by an on-device model; nothing about your photos leaves your Mac.

  1. Build the index onceRun Library ▸ Build Semantic Search Index…. It works through your library in the background — you can keep using the app — and is resumable, so it picks up where it left off. To index just one folder, right-click it in the sidebar and choose Index This Folder for Search.
  2. Search normallyOnce a photo is indexed, meaning-matched results appear in the search box automatically, listed below any exact filename/keyword matches.
Good to know

The bundled model understands English. It ranks by resemblance rather than reading logic, so it doesn't handle negatives — "not red" won't exclude red photos. Pair it with the filters below to narrow further.

Filtering

The Filter Bar above the grid narrows the current view by attributes. Toggle filtering on and off with ⌘L; picking any filter turns filtering on for you.

  • Filter by flag, star rating, colour label and file kind (from the Library menu or the bar itself).
  • Library ▸ Filter by Metadata… narrows by camera, lens, file type and year, read live from the photos in view.
  • Library ▸ Filter by Preset stores a filter combination you use often so you can reapply it in one click.

Saving a search: smart collections

A smart collection is a saved set of rules — "five stars, shot this year, with the keyword portfolio" — that always shows the photos matching them right now, updating itself as you edit your library. Create one with Library ▸ New Smart Collection… and build the rules in the editor. See Library ▸ Collections for the full collection types.