How to search for pictures using keywords in the Photos app on iPhone and iPad

The iPhone and iPad Photos app includes powerful search options to help you quickly find whatever pictures your need from your vast library. In this article, we will go over these options and show you how to use them to search and find pictures like a pro.

Search Photos on iPhone

Places, Event, and People search

Finding photos you took on your vacation to the beach, your friend’s graduation ceremony, or of your kids at the playground has never been easier. Plus, you can search for photos that contain certain objects. For example, you can search the Photos app with any keyword, like pizza, and it will show all your pictures with pizza. Similarly, you can do food, sand, flowers, trees, sunsets, beach, and so on.

Photos App People Place Event Search

You can pop in a word or phrase into the search box or select from the options shown for People, Places, Categories, or Groups.

Tip: The Photos app even smartly categorizes some searches. For example, if you search for fruits, it may sort the pictures into categories like Fruits, the name of a fruit (like Kiwi Fruits in the screenshot below), Citrus Fruits, and so on.

Searching for fruits in iPhone Photos app

Multiple Keyword search

If you want to look for photos with keywords, you can use more than one. However, this isn’t like a normal keyword search you’d use on Google, for instance. Here’s how it works.

Type in your first word, for example, “beach.” Select it from the drop-down suggestions you see. Then, type in your second word, for example, “sunglasses” and select that word from the suggestions. You’ll then see both keywords in the search box and your results below it.

Photos App Multiple Keyword Search

Intelligent search suggestions

Like with the For You tab showing you photos of things the app believes may be important to you, the Intelligent search suggestions does this on the search tab.

As Apple explains it:

It also identifies photos of things you’ve done in the past that may be relevant and important to you now. For instance, if you just went to a tennis match, it may suggest revisiting old photos from a sporting event you went to years ago.

Before you start typing, you’ll see the categories on the screen, as mentioned above. But as you type a keyword, you’ll also see Moments, Categories, and Memories that are related to your search.

Photos App Intelligent Search

Add manual captions and search for them later

You can swipe up on an image in the Photos app or tap the info icon ⓘ and add a caption. After this, that image will appear in the search results whenever you search for that added caption. You can use this hidden tip to add the same caption to several images and make them appear in search when you type that particular caption.

Add caption to photo on iPhone and search for it

When you have hundreds or even thousands of photos on your iPhone or iPad, searching for the one you want is now much easier. You have various options for finding that photo. Which search option do you find to be the most useful?

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