Type what you remember and the app shows the photos on your phone that match: by what they show, the text printed in them, the people on them, your own tags, the place and the camera. With nothing typed, it shows everything, newest first.
Figure 1 — a typed search is one request that runs on your own index; the results open full screen in the app.
01 · The pages of this part
- The header: the six buttons, the search line and the row above the grid.
- Browsing: every photo by date, answered by the phone with no request.
- Words and meaning: what a typed search matches, and the AI switch.
- Search operators: "phrases", +required and -excluded words.
- The text printed in your photos: receipts, labels and screenshots found by what they say.
- People and faces: name a face once, find that person everywhere.
- Autocomplete and Did you mean: suggestions from your own library.
- Grouping results: by best match, date, place, people, tags, folder or camera.
- Why nothing you type can change the query.
02 · Results, reload and cost
- Results come 60 at a time, and more load as you scroll. The thumbnails are drawn from the photos on the phone; nothing is downloaded to show them.
- Pull the grid down to reload it and start a sync as well. The Reload button above the grid reloads only. Both ask the index itself, never a kept answer.
- The same search asked again shortly after is answered from the phone's search cache, so it costs none of your plan's search bandwidth.
- A search by meaning uses a tenth of an AI request; browsing uses nothing. See plan limits.
What you can do with the photos you find, from filters to the full-screen viewer, is in filters and your photos.