I entered a lot of long captions and was assuming I could search on strings in those long captions. I find that search stops getting hits after the 6th or 7th word in the caption. That is disappointing and hopefully a bug that will be fixed.
MacBook Pro (M2 Max, 2023)
I didn't realize that! That stinks. Thanks for telling us. Of course, this is the Apple Community, a group of users like yourself, so Apple doesn't actually read these comments. To let Apple know, go here:
Until it improves, I'll try to remember to put the searchable stuff up front!
Could you give us an example of a string that has not been found?
For example, I searched for "Reforma 63, San Pablo Villa de Mitla Centro, 70430 San Pablo Villa de Mitla, Oax., Mexico", and the search found all entries with exactly this caption.
But any search string needs to include the first words as well. Then the latter words will refine the words. Searching for only the latter words will bring up no result. Very strange.
That explains a lot about why some of my searches work and some don't!
So if I want all my pictures of the Ossuaries, I have to know how all the captions start? crazy ossuary
It is crazy, yes. You would have to make "Ossuaries" a keyword. Or use a smart album with a text rule. Usually I can find the strings in a caption when searching for the string with a text rule in a smart album.
léonie wrote:
Or use a smart album with a text rule.
I have a smart album with this criteria: "Caption includes".
It'll even find the word ossuary in crazyossuary at the end of a long caption.
I have one for Titles also. Smarty albums are very powerful.
Unfortunately, the major reason I'm paying attention to captions at all is that, on an iPhone or on an iPad, keywords don't work. And neither do Smarty Albums.
The original question was regarding a MBP library.
Good to know.
I tested this with macOS 13.5.1 in .mp4, .m4v and .mov movies with the following tag for Description which works in QuickTime Player and Photos (I inserted the description to movies with GraphicConverter 12 and then imported to Photos, if that matters):
Keys:Description:himenaeos vehicula tempus etiam primis tempor sagittis semper eget parturient
I.e. the description has 10 words:
himenaeos vehicula tempus etiam primis tempor sagittis semper eget parturient
The 8th word "semper" is the last word Photos finds as an individual word in all those movies. I wonder if the limit is in characters or words.
I also tested in Finder with Spotlight with those individual words:
Spotlight finds all 10 of them. BUT JUST in .mp4 and .mov.
Spotlight does not find ANYTHING in .m4v.
But if I just change the .m4v suffix to .mp4 or .mov, THEN Spotlight finds all Descriptions.
This is bad because apps like GraphicConverter use Spotlight for search so GC can not find anything in .m4v either.
I have reported this to Apple's feedback page:
Richard.Taylor wrote:
Unfortunately, the major reason I'm paying attention to captions at all is that, on an iPhone or on an iPad, keywords don't work. And neither do Smarty Albums.
That is why I am duplicating all titles as captions.
But the keywords are working in some way on my iPad and iPhone as well. The iOS devices are not displaying the keywords in the Info, but the keywords are synching with iCloud Photo to the iOS devices as well and can be used in a search on the iPhone and iPad. The search is even finding the string "Bird" inside compound keywords like "Animal_Bird_Robin" in Photos iOS: (I tried to recreate Aperture's hierarchical keywords). Here is a screenshot of searching for keywords on my iPhone - the iPhone is set to use German as the primary language - the keywords section is called "Schlagwörter" in German.
I find that the photos caption field only indexes the first 6 or 7 words of long captions.