Search up street name in photos missing

Give this a try: boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and test to see if the problem persists. Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 3 - 5 minutes as it's doing the following; 

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading)

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files

We are having this same issue. I have a small contracting business and all of our crews have iPads. We use these iPads to take photos for estimates, then photos during the work, then photos after it is finished. We have close to 100,000 photos on our cloud. As you can imagine, we have to reference these photos constantly. Sometimes years later. The only easy way for us to search for these photos, is by the street name. Pull up the customer’s file, find the street name. Open your photos, then search the street name… easy. (use to be) We have 2 macs, 4 iPads, and 4 iPhones all attached to the same cloud and photos.

Since the newest update… recently taken photos are not searchable by street name. To verify, I went to one of our iPads (that had not been updated yet) and searched the street name of some newly taken photos that had been uploaded to the cloud. They popped right up. Updated that iPad to the new iOS… and searched for photos taken at the very next home we were estimating… on the same day… and they could not be found.

Searched recently taken photos on another iPad with the older iOS and they popped right up. Searched the same exact photos on an updated iOS, no luck.

Pull up the photo data on the older iOS and you will see the house number and street name listed for the location. Pull up the same photo data on the new iOS and it will show the city and exact coordinates. (Not helpful) We have 20,000 photos in that city, but 30 on that street. This is why searching by street name is the only thing that works when you have 100,000 photos.

Thing is… I know the street name is on the photo data because when looking at the photos location, if you click on “Adjust” it will show you the exact address. So it knows the address, it just won’t display it unless forced. And you can’t search for it either. And having to “Adjust” every single photo we take to include the street address, is ridiculous.

I have played around with this for hours now… its been a stressful nightmare. If we lose the ability to search through 100,000 photos by the street name… our day to day operations just became A NIGHTMARE. Please, please, please find a solution to the problem, or else this is going to cause major problems for our business.

Which system version do you have installed?

For me it is broken to on Monterey. Occasionally Photos will find the photos, when searching for the street name using the main search field, but most photos are no longer found. There should be hundreds of photos with my home address, but Photos is finding only four of them, when I am searching for my address. And all four photos found are having the address as text embedded in the caption of the photo. So they have not been found by the location but by the embedded text.

I have to use the Places view and navigate to the street to find the photos by location. All photos are shown properly on the map.

Or I have to open one of the photos that has been found and use "Show photos nearby" to see the remaining photos at that location.

Or use a smart album with the rule "Text is ..." and enter the name of the street.That will also find all photos taken in the vicinity of the street.

Thank you for confirming!

We have two macs.

The one with Monterey 12.2.1 is currently having the problem and does NOT bring up photos when searching by the street name.

The one with Big Sur 11.6.2 is currently working correctly and will show all photos when searched by street name. This includes photos taken recently on our iPads with the most recent iOS updates. Those newly updated iPads that actually took the photos, won’t allow you to search by the address either.

It seems as though the appropriate location & address data is there within the photo, but it is basically “hidden” in the new iOS. The ability for the user to immediately search for the specific street associated to that location, is not available.

Let’s say we have a week of job estimates, and we go to 10 homes in a day, and have an average of 100 photos per location, for a total of 5,000 a week - all of which tend to be in and around the same “city” . Then, when a crew needs to pull up those photos a month later to start the work, they need to be able to search and find those photos quickly, instead of scrolling through tens of thousands of photos (that all look similar). Searching by “city” does nothing to help us whatsoever. Searching by street was the only simple way.

It might be too late - but I would never rely on automated features such as this for business critical data - especially on what is basically a consumer app.

You’d be much better off building the data you need into the organisation features. Such as adding the customer reference as a keyword, or using folders and albums to organise by project/customer etc.

It might be time to start doing something like this now for future business.

What you might be able to do for existing photos is use the map view, and zoom in on the customer address that way.

You still can provided your pictures have location data attached. I have no issues searching by address.