Searching photo metadata using Windows Explorer
June 30, 2021You’ve meticulously added metadata to your photos, detailing when and where taken, and using keywords to tag the people in the photos (Tip: the free AnalogExif program is good for adding metadata quickly; https://sourceforge.net/projects/analogexif/).
Now you try to search for specific photos in your collection using Explorer, but when you search for a word you know is in the keywords or is part of the title, you get nothing, and you wonder why you did all that work!
Well, you can search the metadata using Explorer but there’s a trick to it—you have to tell Explorer the metadata property to search.
So instead of typing John Smith as your search criteria in Explorer, you need to enter tag: John Smith or keyword: John Smith to find all photos tagged with his name as a keyword. If you want to find more than one person, you need to enter tag: John Smith; tag: Michelle Martin to only get photos with BOTH those people in them.
To find words in a title, enter title: Adelaide to find all photos with Adelaide in the title. Similarly, copyright: jones to find all photos with that copyright designation.
Not all photo metadata is searchable, however. I found that Camera maker: EPSON and maker weren’t searchable, but authors and subject were (Update Feb 2022: Jim in the comments below said that if you use Cameramaker: EPSON it will work—you have to remove the spaces from the metadata tag name; thanks Jim!). I didn’t test all possible metadata properties, but those mentioned above should be sufficient for most wanting a quick way to search their photos. For more in-depth searches, you may need to use specialised software, such as photo editing software.
Note: You must enter a colon after the metadata property’s word, and a semicolon to separate others you add to the same search string. You can use two different properties in one search; for example subject: adelaide; tag: michelle would find all photos matching both criteria.
[Links last checked June 2021]
CyberText Newsletter 
This is very helpful, thanks!
Could not get this to work: Windows 10 PC with three drives, photos not on Drive that has system, metadata added and edited using Photoshop. Cannot find any files from searches
Hi David
I’m also using Windows 10 and I just used File Explorer on my PC to search for tagged photos on a NAS drive, using the above instructions. Worked fine for me. Have you checked the metadata properties on some photos to make sure it went into the correct ‘categories’ – e,g. if you’re searching for ‘tag: xx’ is there actually anything in the Tag property? Check via File explorer, NOT Photoshop, in case Photoshop has its own proprietary method of storing metadata.
–Rhonda
(Programname:Adobe) I did use this and it worked for me really happy I sorted out my 1500+ lightroom images from 40k+ images thanks for the tip
This is exactly what I need but I’m a Mac user. Is there a way for a Mac?
Sorry, Brian — I have no idea. With luck, someone who uses a Mac might offer a solution. I did a quick Google search for “search photo metadata on mac” and got several possibilities you might like to try.
–Rhonda
Great post! I would like to add that your example of “Camera maker: EPSON” does work if you remove the space in the property name, so “Cameramaker: EPSON” will work. This is the same with most of the multi-word file properties in Windows. Thanks, keep up the informative posts!
Very useful tip. BTW: In localized versions of Windows you need to enter the localized terms, which are sometimes badly translated, e.g. German: caption -> betreff, keywords-> markierungen
Probably everyone figured this out, but if you have ‘People’ tags as you used to be able to do in ‘Windows Photo Gallery’ You need to search for ‘People: John’ Training wildcards are apparently not needed (John*) Good news is that if you use a wildcard search like ‘*John’ it works whether you have a tag, a title or a person… It is too bad Microsoft doesn’t make this easier or better explained.