Find searches through photos within an active contact sheet tab. You can open the Find window by either navigating to Edit> Find or using the keyboard shortcut command-F (macOS) or control-F (Windows.)
Find searches through both superficial information (the name of a photo) and the IPTC data associated with a photo.
Find Options
Find: Any of the words/All of the words: If your search phrase has more than one word, specify whether you want to find any word in the phrase or only results that have all the words. This is useful if you want to find only photographs from a single photographer in a shoot (All of the words: Smith Bob) or from two locations (Any of the words: Salem Eugene).
In: Selected items/All items: Choose Selected items if you have already selected photos in your contact sheet and are trying to drill down further. Otherwise, select All items to search through the entire active contact sheet.
Criteria: Optional - select additional criteria for searches that are case sensitive, restricted to whole words, or using Regular Expressions (Grep.) Regular Expressions are an advanced language for searches.
Switch Contact Sheet to ‘Selected’ Filter on successful Find: When selected, the Contact Sheet will filter to show only the selected files that match the Find search. To go back to viewing all images in the Contact Sheet, use the View—>All menu shortcut or the F1 keyboard shortcut.
Case Sensitive search: Select this if when the case of a word differentiates it from another. For example: searching for a name that is also a common noun, such as Daisy and daisy.
Whole words: select this to find a whole word that can also be used as letters making up a longer word.
Example: You want to find the word "book" but not "bookkeeper".
Grep: Similar to the command-line utility, grep searches for text that matches a regular expression.
Searching: Check to search Filenames, IPTC data, or both. (You must choose at least one)
Treat repeating fields as single string: Repeating fields refers to metadata fields that contain comma separated values, such as the Description Writers, Keywords, and Persons Shown fields. Single string refers to searching for all of the words or characters together as a single phrase, ignoring any commas.
When searching IPTC data, look through the following fields: Use this area to include or exclude specific IPTC fields.
When you are satisfied, the Find button will select those items for you in your open contact sheet. The Find window will remain open in case you want to refine your results or choose another contact sheet tab.
