Searching your library

There are two ways to find a photo, and they work together: type what you remember of it, or filter by facts about it — how it was taken, when and where. The search box at the top of the library does the first; the Filters button beside it does the second.

The search box looks through your whole library, even with a folder open. To look inside that folder only, pick its name next to Search in, above the photos. Each folder you open starts back on the whole library.

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Search by what is in the photo

Every photo you upload is analyzed once, on every plan, and search reads what the analysis wrote: the scene and the time of day ("beach", "dusk"), objects ("bicycle", "tram"), text in the photo (a shop sign, a race number), landmarks, places and events ("Eiffel Tower", "wedding"), its strengths and problems ("sharp focus", "blur"), and its tags. Its star rating and how many people are in the photo are filters.

Type any of those words into the search box, together with words from the file name. A photo with every word you typed is found — small words like "the" and "at" aside — and search is forgiving:

• Typos — one wrong letter is fine in a word of four letters or more, two in a word of seven or more.
• Word forms — "dogs" finds "dog", "running" finds "run".
• Synonyms — common ones count as the same word: kid, child and toddler; beach, shore and coast; and so on.
• Camera file names — the start of a name or the frame number in it is enough: "DSC" and "0418" both find DSC_0418.NEF.
• Accents — "café" finds café however your computer wrote it in the file name, and "cafe" finds it too.

Search also goes by meaning. It compares what you typed with each photo's analysis as a whole, so the photos closest in meaning are found too, even when the analysis put it in other words. Results come best match first — the sort menu says Best match — with the photos that match both ways at the top; in a small library the last ones may be only loosely related.

With photo analysis turned off, a photo uploaded since is found only by its name, its folder, where, when and with what it was taken, and your own marks — see Photo analysis.

Search by place, camera and year

The search box also knows where, when and with what each photo was taken:

• the place — the city, county, state or country its GPS position is in: "Tokyo", "Bavaria", "France" (a country by its English name: "France" finds every photo taken there). Searched as words, a place keeps its accents — "Reykjavík" finds it, "reykjavik" does not; to skip typing them, pick the place from the suggestions, which don't need them
• the camera — its make or model: "Canon", "sony", "EOS R5"
• the lens — any word of its name: "85mm" finds the FE 85mm F1.4 GM and the EF85mm f/1.8 USM alike
• the year it was taken: "2023"

Mix them with everything else: "beach 2023" puts first the beaches you photographed in 2023 — and any beach photo with 2023 written in it. A word with a number in it is matched exactly, so "2023" doesn't match 2022 and "85mm" doesn't match a 135mm lens; but because search also goes by meaning, other years' beaches can follow further down. To keep to one year, camera or lens, type a filter instead: taken:2023, lens:85mm.

Your own ratings, labels and keywords

If you rate, label and keyword your photos in Lightroom, Bridge, Capture One or Photo Mechanic, the photos you export carry those marks, and Media Moana reads them when you upload: your star rating (1–5), your pick or reject flag, your color label and your keywords. They are read from inside the JPEG, HEIC and DNG files themselves. Sidecar .xmp files are not uploaded — they are skipped like any file that isn't a photo — so for a RAW file whose marks are only in its sidecar, upload an exported JPEG, or a DNG with the metadata saved into it. Lightroom Classic keeps its pick and reject flags in its catalog, not in the files it exports, so its photos arrive with their stars, labels and keywords but no flag.

Your keywords are searched like every other word: "wedding" finds the photos you keyworded Wedding. Your rating, flag, label and keywords are also filters, in a group of their own, Rating & keywords — tick 4★ and 5★ for your best — and can be typed: rating:>=4, flag:picked, label:red, keyword:wedding. Rating is yours; Stars, under In the photo, is the analysis's — how the two relate.

The marks are read once, when the photo is uploaded: changing them later in your editor doesn't change a photo that is already in your library.

Leave words out, or keep words together

• A minus sign in front of a word leaves out every photo it would find: beach -people finds the beaches with nobody on them. Synonyms count — -people also leaves out a photo with "person" in it — but typos don't, so -beach keeps the benches. Leave out as many words as you like: beach -people -dog.
• Quotes keep words together, in that order: "golden hour" finds photos where those two words come together, not every photo with something golden and an hour somewhere. Inside quotes there are no typo allowances and no synonyms; upper and lower case still don't matter.
• A minus sign works on quoted words too, and everything combines: sunset -"golden hour", "new york" -people 2023.
• A search of left-out words alone shows everything else: -people is your whole library without the photos of people.

Leaving a word out goes by everything the search box reads — the name, the place, the camera and all that the analysis wrote: -people also leaves out a photo whose strengths read "no people in the frame". To go by how many people are in a photo, use the People filter.

Pick from suggestions

From the second letter you type, a list opens under the search box with values from your own photos that begin with what you typed, or have a word that does: places, tags, objects, scenes, times of day, events, landmarks, your own keywords and color labels, cameras and lenses, grouped by filter, each with how many photos it has. "tok" offers Tokyo under City, "york" offers New York, "fra" offers France under Country. Accents needn't be typed: "zurich" offers Zürich, "sao" São Paulo — and "zü" only Zürich.

Pick one — with the arrow keys and Enter, or a click — and it becomes that filter: a chip above the photos like any other, and the search box empties. Like every filter it narrows what you have open on the left, together with the filters already on, and the number beside a suggestion is how many photos you will see once you pick it. Press Enter without picking to search for what you typed; Esc closes the list.

Type a filter

Some filters can be typed straight into the search box, beside your words: beach camera:sony stars:>=4 is the beaches taken with a Sony and rated four stars or more. Press Enter and each name:value becomes its filter — a chip above the photos, which you remove like any other — while the words stay in the box and are searched. Until you press Enter, the box searches only your words. The ? at the end of the search box lists them all:

• Upper and lower case don't matter, nor do accents, and a value is matched against your own photos: camera:sony is your SONY photos, camera:nikon finds NIKON CORPORATION, place:reykjavik Reykjavík. Put a value with spaces in quotes.
• The same name twice is either value: camera:sony camera:canon is photos from either camera, as ticking both in the filter is.
• A value none of your photos has filters to nothing — remove its chip to get your photos back. A name the search box doesn't know, like foo:bar, is searched as words.
• Typed or picked in the filters, it is the same filter: the same chips, the same photos, the same counts.

Filter by how it was taken

Click Filters at the end of the search box. The filters drop down from the search box, as wide as it is, and float over your photos, so the photos keep their layout and you watch them change as you pick; on a wide screen they sit in two columns — when, where, your ratings and keywords, and what is in the photo on the left, camera, exposure and file on the right. Show only favorites is at the top; the rest are grouped, folded to their names until you open one, and only the filters your photos have values for appear. ISO, Aperture, Shutter speed, Focal length, Year taken and your Rating are laid out along their own scale, f/1.4 before f/16, each value over a bar as tall as its share of your photos, so they also show you how you shoot. The other filters list each value with its count; one with many values — lenses, places, tags — has a search box of its own, which from two letters finds every value of yours that matches, not only the ones listed, each with its count. A filter you have set shows what it is set to even when folded, and one button opens or folds them all. They narrow what you have open on the left: All photos, or a single folder — open the shoot's folder first to filter just that shoot. Opening another folder, or All photos, starts again with no filters.

The gear button chooses which filters the panel offers.

The place comes from the photo's GPS position, looked up offline into its country, state, county and the nearest town or city. A photo without a position has no place.

Filters and the search box combine: "boat" with Camera model set to your Fujifilm and Year taken 2024 finds exactly that. The active filters show as chips above the photos, which stay in view under the open panel; click × on one to drop it, or — once two or more are on — Clear filters to drop them all. Esc or a click outside the panel closes it, and closing keeps the filters on: their chips stay above the photos.

Stars (the analysis's) and People are ranges — for example, only photos it rated four or five, or with no people in them. Photo issues narrows to the problems the analysis found, such as blur or noise.

Browse instead

Two ways of looking go further than a layout:

• Map — where the photos were taken, in clusters; click one to see its photos. It shows what the search box and filters have narrowed to, and says how many of those photos have no location.
• Date taken — the library's own order when you aren't searching: the grid lays the photos out month by month, and the year menu beside the sort narrows them to one year. Search results come best match first; pick Date taken in the sort menu to see them month by month too.

Bursts and look-alike shots have a place of their own on the left, Similar photos — see Your library.

Come back to a search

What you typed, the filters you set, the sort you picked and, in a folder, Search in are kept in the page's address. Reload the page and the search is still there; bookmark it, or open the link on another device signed in to your account, and you get the same search. Your browser's Back button takes you to the place you were in before, not to your previous search.

Share what you found

Select the photos a search found and choose Add to album…: they go into an album, whichever folders they are in, ready to share as one link. A new album made this way remembers the search, and offers the photos you upload later that match it — see New photos for an album.