How to search for photos taken on a certain date

Andrew Shalit wrote:

This question pertains to the Photos app on the Mac.

I often find myself wanting to search for all the photos taken on a certain date. I can't figure out how to do that.

Let's say I want to search for photos taken on September 9, 2017. If I type "September" into the search box, it offers to show me all the pictures taken in any September of any year. Great, that's a good first step. But then if I type "September 9" it offers to show me photos taken in September of any year whose filename includes the number "9". If I type "September 9 2017" it says there are no results. I've tried typing the dates in every format I can think of, with no luck.

I'm missing something obvious, right? There's gotta be a way to search for photos taken on a specific date, doesn't there?

Do I have to go to the trouble of creating a Smart Album do this? It's weird that typing a date into the search box doesn't work.

You can at least search for a month of a year in Photos 3.0 on Sierra:

Enter the month, a space, then the year: