I use it all the time - it's the killer feature of google photos. The premise is that if you come back from vacation with 300 photos, it's unlikely that you (the average non photography-nerd user) are going to sit there and tag them all. If in a few years you want to find "that photo of me you took on the beach in north carolina", with a quick search you can.

There are annoying limitations though, probably because the original team moved on and it's in maintenance stage. Using my example above, google photos has no idea what the "outer banks" are (which is where the beach photos were taken in north carolina) and returns no results. It also has trouble parsing out entities from search terms, so "north carolina beach maggie" isn't going to find pictures of Maggie on the beach in North Carolina (which you'd think they could really fix given that, well, they're google). Finally, there's no way (that I know of) to jump from search results to your full timeline; let's say that "north carolina beach" gets me a bunch of beach pictures from January 2015 (yeah, it was cold), but doesn't have _the_ picture from the trip that I know I want - there's no direct way to click to January 2015 from the results, which really sucks. (Instead you have to go back out of results and use their fiddly scroll to get there.)

Yeah, it's a killer feature, but I really wish they had some sort of a documented "search API".

Instead of natural language search, where I have no idea whether it understood me, I wish I could do (modifying your example):

"North Carolina" "Maggie Thomson" "Tom Morgan" -beach 2018

for all photos in NC, with Maggie and Tom, not in a beach from 2018

and even better, if it could tell me the number of results that would show up if we removed each keyword above.

I guess it's a tough problem, even for Google :(

> there's no direct way to click to January 2015 from the results, which really sucks. (Instead you have to go back out of results and use their fiddly scroll to get there.)

It's amusing how people's insights can turn myopic. Search in photos is the killer feature, and it even solves the problem that you have.

If you realize that you need to see photos from January 2015, don't try to scroll back in your photos feed. Just do a second search for "January 2015".

That's worse than click-to-this-photo-in-context though. Maybe I have 4000 photos from January 2015, so it doesn't help to search for the month.

To an extent it does. For example “Seattle night in July” shows me night pictures taken in Seattle the one July I was there a few years ago.

I try to use it often but it works pretty poorly and I always have to scroll through years of photos to look for what I need.

For me the killer feature of Google photos are: - Free storage of photos (hence why I'll move after I run out of free space) - Tagging faces - Sharing albums

It's a great idea that works in a limited way. Getting that next 30% is going to take awhile nevermind natural language queries.

There's more you can do honestly. Search and and assign people so you can find picture with just them. This also works for pets. People, pets , objects, place, etc. Hell, I searched the car I use to drift and it showed up. It's really neat.

The search is really quite fun to play with, and very useful! I also like searching on the map and seeing where I’ve taken photos. Especially if I’m looking for one particular photo, it’s fun to zoom in from the world map

Thanks for pointing that out. I actually had the opportunity to sync my iPhone photos to Google Photos, but opted to decline. This made me reconsider; cheers.

Why would this feature , that is also apart of Photos, make you reconsider ?

As much as I like apple / iCloud / my iPhone, I do like the idea of seeing all the places on a map that I’ve traveled with my lovely wife Emily. We’re hoping to go to the Seychelles if the next three months work out at my contract gig.

I like the idea of being able to type “water” and see a bunch of water bottles mixed in with all the water-y places we’ve visited.

What sealed the deal was to see it on a map. I typed “water” into Photos just now, and it did a pretty good job. But there’s something peculiar about being able to look at a pin and say “I’ve been at that pin.”

Just a silly thing. But it costs me nothing to get it, so I want it.

Yes but I’m saying that’s a feature in Photos right now. So long as the photo has location data , you can see it on the Map in Places on the albums tab.

Thank you! I did finally figure out what you were pointing out. Apparently there is a “places” album, as you say.

For some reason, it only has 40 places, whereas I have 9,987 photos. I definitely have photos from Cancun, so I wonder if the location data somehow got stripped, possibly when I got a new iPhone around 4 months ago… though that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for pointing out that the thing I wanted already exists on iOS, even if it didn’t have a pin on Cancun. I’ll check the exif data someday, perhaps, or sync to Google photos and see if it pops up.

Cheers!

I use this feature occasionally, but it also seems to be pretty bad for the searches I try. For example, if I search for 'dog', I do indeed get pictures back that contain my dog. However, there are a ton of false negatives -- that is to say, the 'dog' search doesn't show me all of the photos that most definitely and very clearly have my dog in them.

And it's not just dogs. Specific people, locations (before I turned of geotagging on my photos), scenery (mountains, outdoors), etc.

Sometimes this search is nice, but it's not good enough that I can really rely on it.