Using Enhanced Search

The Enhanced Search feature helps you find your special moments easily and quickly. You can filter your media with multiple parameters, all from one place. You can also build a user story for search. For example, you can easily view the results for any of the following:

• All John’s good images (rating equal to or greater than 4), tagged as Family (keyword), and dated March 2016 (date)
• All media files of Deborah's birthdays for the past five years
• Videos that you shot in Hawaii on your last vacation

You can search across all these parameters from a single window that Enhanced Search provides. Once you find the images you are searching for, you can easily edit or share them using Elements Organizer.

With Enhanced Search, you can search your media files with a combination of one or more of the following parameters:

Search Bar: The search bar at the top-center of the Organizer window allows you to search based on various criteria such as People, Places, Events, and more.

Smart Tags: Smart Tags automatically analyze the content of your photos and assign relevant keywords based on what they detect. These keywords can then be used to quickly search and filter your photos. These might include nature, portraits, food, cityscapes, dogs, cats, etc.

People: The People search functionality is designed to help you find photos containing people. It utilizes facial recognition technology and your input to make searching for photos with specific individuals or groups easier.

Places:  If your photos have location data embedded (geotag), you can filter by location to find pictures taken in a specific place.

Calendar: Filter photos by the date they were taken (e.g., all photos from last summer).

Folders: To organize your photos and videos and make browsing easier, create folders with a clear and consistent naming system. You can categorize your photos using dates, events, or themes.

Keywords: Keywords search allows you to find specific photos based on descriptive words you assign to them. It's like adding labels to your photos, making them easier to categorize and search for later.

Albums: Album search allows you to browse your photos based on user-created albums. It offers a more flexible and thematic approach compared to the structured organization of folders.

Events: Allows you to search for your photographs or video files by the event they are associated with, such as a wedding or a birthday.

Rating: Rating search lets you find photos for which you've assigned star ratings. It's a helpful way to quickly locate your favorite photos or prioritize specific images within your collection.

Media Types: You can search your files based on their media types, such as Photos, Audio, Videos, and Projects.

Using Enhanced Search

To use the Enhanced Search feature, do the following:

How search works within and across categories

When you search for multiple entities within a category, the search result displays all media files that contain one or more of the entities that you specified. To illustrate this point, in the previous example, you searched in the People panel for images that included Deborah, Dave, or Sara. In this case, all images that have any one (or more) of these people are displayed.

When, in addition to these people, you expand the search to include the images that have a star rating of 3 or higher, the search results are updated to show only those media files that include one or more of these people and that have the star rating of 3 or higher. For example, if any media file includes Deborah, but has a star rating of 2, that file is not displayed.

Thus, searching across the categories, only those media files are displayed that satisfy the conditions across categories.

Therefore, in the example that was provided earlier, the search results display all media files that meet the following conditions:

• The file includes one or more of the people you selected, and
  
• The file has a star rating of 3 or higher, and
• The file was created in 2016

Displaying recent searches

The Recent searches panel displays a list of the previous searches you have performed. Click in the search text bar to see the last ten searches you performed. To run a search again, click the search text.

Search media using Multiple Criteria

By typing in the Text bar, you can combine multiple options for a multi-criteria search to search for media files. Type a name or word, and Elements Organizer displays media files matching the text across various criteria. Elements Organizer also provides suggestions as you type based on the existing people, places, events, smart tags, and so on in your catalog. For example, if you type "D", the people, places, events, and so on, starting with "D" are displayed. 

As you type in more text, the list changes dynamically to display tags, and you can select from the displayed options that match the text being entered. If you select any item in the list, a search for that tag is performed, and the results are displayed in Elements Organizer.

The text search also supports the operators: “AND,” “OR,” or “NOT.” These operators are represented as follows:

• OR: Represented by the "/" symbol
• AND: Represented by the "+" symbol
• EXCLUDE: Represented by the "-" symbol

By default, the entries within a panel (for example, People) are separated by OR (the "/" symbol), and the entries across the panel are separated by AND (the "+" symbol). You can change the operator by clicking the symbol, as shown here.

You can specify that certain media files be excluded from the results. For example, to remove the files with the keyword "bridge" from the search results, include the "bridge" keyword prefixed with a "-" sign.