Searching Photos in iOS Is Smarter Than You Think
Since the camera in your iPhone is so good, you’re probably like me and take thousands of pictures. The problem I always run into is finding the one I want later on. It’s almost like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes. I recently discovered a way to make finding the right picture much easier, though. As it turns out, iOS Photos has a search feature, and it’s smarter than you might think.
Searching Photos in iOS: A Quick How-To
There's a search button you might have missed in iOS Photos
If you haven’t paid much attention to the screen in iOS Photos, you might be wondering how you search your pictures in the first place. There’s actually a search button in the app, located in the top right corner of the screen. It’s a magnifying glass next to the Select button. Tap on it, and away you go.
Using Keywords in Your Search
At first, I thought this feature would only search simple things that I already knew were built in. I figured it would search faces, locations, and possibly album names or descriptions. I quickly discovered that the search function is much smarter than that. It can even pick up on specific keywords, like things or objects.
As you can see, performing a search in iOS Photos gives you a few categories it thinks might be applicable to your search term. Tap on one of them, and you get a collection of images related to that category. It’s not perfect, of course – I have many more images of my dogs than that. The fact that it can recognize they are dogs at all is fairly impressive, though.
Other Search Terms That Work
I’ve also used the search function to look for pictures of particular people, which iOS Photos recognizes from the Faces feature. Items, descriptions, objects, places and people seem to work best. It’s definitely a great feature to have. The only drawback is that you have to go into the iOS Photos app to use it; there’s no searching photos from Spotlight.