Search

Search looks through every photo and album you are allowed to see and returns both in one page, counted separately. It accepts plain words as well as a compact query syntax for narrowing results by tag, date, camera, rating, aspect ratio, or colour.

• Press / from the gallery, or use the search bar in the header.
• v8 Press mod+k anywhere to open the search palette. It mixes live search results with your albums, the pages you can navigate to, the admin tiles you have access to, and quick actions: the contextual album actions (edit, share, move, watermark, apply renamer, scan for faces, add tracks, upload), switching the language, and toggling dark mode.
• Searching from inside an album scopes the query to that album. A Search all albums instead link clears the scope.
• A query only fires once it reaches search_minimum_length_required characters (4 by default).
• Results are paginated at search_pagination_limit entries, and the photo grid uses the layout set by search_photos_layout. They can be re-sorted by title, date added, or date taken, ascending or descending.

A word without a modifier matches photos whose title, description, location, camera model, or tags contain it, and albums whose title, description, or tags contain it.

Several words are combined with AND: each term must match. Use double quotes to keep a phrase together, and a trailing * to match a prefix instead of a substring.

sunset beach          both terms must match
"golden gate"         the phrase, as one term
berlin*               starts with "berlin"

A token is written modifier:value. Unknown modifiers are treated as plain text, so a stray colon never breaks a search.

Notes on the trickier ones:

• Dates accept an exact day (date:2024-05-01) or a comparison with >, >=, <, <=, =. Several date: tokens are combined with AND, which is how you express a range: date:>=2024-06-01 date:<=2024-06-30.
• Ratios accept the named buckets landscape, portrait, and square, or a numeric comparison such as ratio:<=0.75. Square means a ratio between 0.95 and 1.05.
• Colours accept the 16 CSS colour names (plus grey) or a #rrggbb value, and match against the palette extracted from each photo. A photo matches when one of its five palette colours is within search_colour_distance of the target, measured as a Manhattan distance in RGB. Photos imported before palettes were computed do not match until their palette is generated.
• Ratings require a comparison operator. rating:avg: uses the average of everyone’s ratings, rating:own: uses yours and needs you to be logged in. Plain rating:>=4 is treated as avg.
• Modifiers that only make sense for photos (everything except title:, description:, date:, and tag:) simply exclude albums from the results rather than filtering them.

The advanced panel builds the same query from form fields, so you never have to memorise the syntax. It exposes title, description, location, tags, a date range, media type (image, video, RAW, live), orientation, minimum average rating, minimum personal rating, the EXIF fields (make, model, lens, aperture, shutter, focal length, ISO), and the sort order.

Search only returns what the requester may see. Anonymous visitors can use it only when search_public is enabled, and then only on publicly accessible content. Photos in sensitive albums are excluded when hide_nsfw_in_search is on; see Sensitive Albums.

The same searchability rules feed the RSS feed and Frame, which is why a photo hidden from search is also absent from those.

hide_nsfw_in_search, under Sensitive Albums, additionally excludes sensitive photos from the results.