Photos: Yes, it can be used for search, too

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Photos: Yes, it can be used for search, too

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Most of us take photos with our smartphones, possibly edit them, possibly post them to social media—and never look at them again. But how do you find a specific photo years after the fact?

Here, Windows Search isn’t helpful, but the Photos app is, sort of. As a test, I searched my Photos folder on OneDrive via File Explorer for any photos of “Las Vegas”—home to many CES trade shows over the years. File Explorer turned up nothing, but using the Photos search box at the top of the app I was able to turn up several related photos. Photos is also useful for searching specific scenes (“snow” or “beach”) although its knowledge of your photo’s metadata seems a little skimpy.

It’s here that backing up photos to multiple cloud storage providers pays off. While Windows contains a multitude of privacy controls, Google’s own Google Photos app basically indexes everything, using facial recognition, metadata, and more—and using it produced hundreds of photos of products we’ve all forgotten about by now.

There are other dedicated search utilities for Windows: Everything, Grepwin, DocFetcher and more, if Windows Search can’t find what you’re looking for. The point, though, is that Windows Search by itself doesn’t seem particularly useful. But with a little knowledge and tweaking, it can be.
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