Search in the picture manager

One search, two ways to make it

The search line at the top of the manager takes plain words, masks and a few key:value words. Each part of the search becomes a chip under the folder's name, and the pictures change as you type or click.

The ⓘ in the search line (or F1 while you type) shows what you can type, in short.

With the mouse alone: Find pictures

Not a word to type: the sliders button next to ⓘ in the search line opens Find pictures, a window with the whole search on one page. It is also at the top of the Filter menu, and on Ctrl+Shift+F.

• Ready-made on the left fills it in one click: Screenshots, Large pictures, Taken this year, Every December, On this day, Photos at night, 4K and bigger, Panoramas, 360° photos, Phone photos… Change any part after it.
• Name, Type, Size, Date, Picture and Camera or phone each turn on with their switch and offer choices, each with how many pictures it would find: kinds of names, the types there are, ready-made sizes, times and the years as bars, the time of day, sizes in pixels and shapes, the cameras and phones there are. Where says where to look.
• At the bottom, always in view: the first pictures found, how many, and the line the search will be — the same words as above, if you want to learn them.
• Show closes the window: what you picked becomes the chips under the folder's name, and the grid shows the pictures. Opened again, the window starts from the search as it is.

Names

Anything without a key is about the file's name. Capital and small letters are the same, unless you ask otherwise.

Masks and words go together: *.png sunset finds PNG pictures with “sunset” in the name.

Type

The types the manager shows: JPG (also jpeg), PNG, HEIC (also heif), WebP, AVIF, TIFF (also tif), GIF, BMP, JXR and ICO. On the type's card each one shows how many pictures it has.

Size

kb, mb and gb count as Explorer does: 1 MB is 1,024 KB. Without a unit a number is in MB.

Dates

modified: is when the file was last saved, created: when it got onto this disk. Every form below works with both.

Created is rarely the day a photo was taken: copied to a new PC, all the photos get the day of copying. For photos, taken: below is the date you want.

What is inside the photos

When a photo was taken, its size in pixels, its shape and the camera or phone are inside the file, not in Explorer's list. The search reads them once from each file's header — no picture is opened — and keeps them, so the next search is instant.

The first search of a folder reads its pictures in the background: the line under the folder's name says how far it is, and the pictures come in as they are read. Files kept only in the cloud are not read — that would download them — so they are not found by these words.

Places

Where a photo was taken comes from its GPS, read with the other details. Cobalt Photo names the country, the region and the town itself, from countries and towns built into it: nothing is sent anywhere, and it works offline.

The Place card lists the countries the photos were taken in, their regions and towns, with how many in each: a click chooses one, the field above finds one by any of its names. Find pictures has the same in its Place part, and the ready-made Trips and Without location.

A town is the nearest one, a big town reaching further than a small one; further than 15 km from any, the inspector says how far the nearest is. Places come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Natural Earth.

Saved searches

A search you come back to can be kept in the sidebar under Searches, with the folder it looks in and whether it looks in the folders inside it too.

• Save search in the row of conditions, the + beside Searches or Ctrl+S: a name is offered from the conditions; change it if you like.
• A click opens its folder with the search in the line, its name over the pictures. Pictures added since that match are in it by themselves: a saved search is a question, not a list.
• Beside its name, how many it found when it was open last (it can be turned off on the same card).
• Right-click: rename it, put the search shown in its place (the name stays), move it up or down, delete it. Deleting a search deletes no pictures.

All or any

A picture is shown when it matches every condition. With match:any (or Match any under the folder's name), one of them is enough.

Where it looks

The first chip under the folder's name says where the search looks; the choice is kept.

• This folder and the ones in it — the folder shown and every folder inside it, however deep, as Explorer's search does. The pictures come in while the folders are looked through; the line under the folder's name says when it is done.
• Only this folder — just the pictures of the folder shown.
• Hidden and system files and folders are left out, as Explorer leaves them out.
• Files kept only in the cloud (OneDrive, Dropbox “online only”) are found by their name, size and dates; no file is downloaded to search them.
• A picture found in a folder below: Go to its folder in its menu opens that folder with it selected.

Select by mask

As in Total Commander, the numeric keypad selects without hiding anything: the pictures a mask takes are added to the selection, or taken out of it. The field takes the same words as the search line, so size:>10mb or modified:2021 work there too.

Select by mask… and Deselect by mask… are in the ⋯ menu of the selection bar and in the menu of the grid's empty space too.

Keys