I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom Classic for over a decade now, and I genuinely like it—most of the time.
But while Lightroom Classic offers a great set of editing tools, and I do appreciate its all-in-one workflow capabilities, there’s one thing that Lightroom doesn’t do well:
Photo search.
Yes, Lightroom lets you organize thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or (at least in my case) millions of photos in a single archive. It’s a very nice photo organizer, and it’s used by millions of photographers, from beginners all the way to professionals. But finding specific files in Lightroom, especially as your image library grows, can be really, really hard.
Fortunately, if you’re struggling to search your Lightroom Classic catalog for particular images (or particular sets of images), all is not lost. Adobe has incorporated a few basic search features, which allow you to sort and filter images based on various characteristics (keywords, filenames, metadata, etc).
And if you want more powerful Lightroom search tools, there are AI-powered plugins that integrate nicely with LrC’s existing interface, and which can make finding (and organizing) your photos a whole lot easier.
Below, I walk you through the different search features available to you in Lightroom Classic. Then I offer a quick overview of a Lightroom plugin, Excire Search, which is now my go-to tool for finding photos in my catalog.
Let’s dive right in!
Searching for Photos in Lightroom Classic: The Basics
As I said above, Lightroom offers a few features for finding photos within your catalog. And while I find these options imprecise, they can be useful in some situations—and they’re certainly better than scrolling endlessly through every single image thumbnail!
The Sort Bar
At the bottom of Lightroom’s Library module, you’ll find the Sort Bar:
Which lets you arrange your catalog (or a catalog subset, such as a folder or a collection) by attributes such as:
- Capture Time
- Edit Time
- File Name
- Rating
- Aperture
To use the Sort Bar, just click on the Sort Criteria field, and you’ll see a little fly-out menu:
So if you’re searching for a particular portrait image, and you happen to know that it was shot at, say, f/1.2, you could set the sort criteria to Aperture, then take a look through the top results.
Note that you can reverse the sorting order by selecting the A/Z icon:
Personally, I find the Sort Bar useful when I’m going through a huge volume of images and I want to make sure they’re ordered chronologically, but I’ve never really used it to dig up specific photos; in other words, the Sort Bar is fine for ordering images but bad at helping you retrieve particular shots.
Lightroom Classic offers another tool, however, which does a better job in that regard:
The Filter Bar
If you haven’t spent much time playing around in the Lightroom Classic Library Module, you may be unfamiliar with the Filter Bar. But it offers a decent way to search for photos in your catalog, since you can use it to filter the images in your current view by text, metadata, and other criteria.
(What’s especially useful is that you can layer multiple filters on top of one another; this means that you can narrow down your search based on metadata, then apply a text search on top of the metadata filter, then filter the resulting images based on certain attributes, for example.)
You can find the Filter Bar in a couple of different places. At the bottom of the Library module, you’ll see a set of basic filtering criteria:
Here, you can filter a set of images based on flags, editing status, star ratings, color labels, and more.
But for more granular filtering options, you’ll need to press the forward slash key (\) on your keyboard, which opens the full-fledged Filter Bar with its many filtering options.
There are three main filter types:
1. Text
The Text tab lets you search for images by typing in text, which will bring up images based on the corresponding:
- File Names
- Keywords
- Captions
- Metadata fields
- Alt text
You can also choose how the search term is matched to the text in the image file (e.g., “contains,” “starts with,” or “does not contain”).
For example, if you keyworded a photo with “beach,” you could find it by choosing Any Searchable Field and Contains All, then typing in the word “beach.”
As you can imagine, text-based searches can be very powerful. However, in order to effectively find images using text queries, the images must be labeled (e.g., you must have added descriptive keywords prior to using the Text filter).
And even after you’ve carefully tagged each and every file in your Lightroom catalog, you must always remember which labels have been applied to which images.
In other words, if you’ve applied the keywords “silhouette,” “golden hour,” and “beach” to a seaside landscape shot, you’ll be able to retrieve the image by typing “beach,” but your searches for “water,” “ocean,” “landscape,” and “seascape” will come up empty.
This is a problem faced by many photographers. But as I explain later on in this article, there is a neat little solution you can use to bypass this difficulty!
2. Attribute
The Attribute filter is fairly intuitive; it lets you isolate images based on:
- Flags (e.g., Picks, Rejects)
- Star ratings
- Color labels
- Edit status
- Export status
- File kind (i.e., original photos, virtual copies, or videos)
It’s handy for narrowing down a set of images to your best or most recently edited work. I sometimes use it when culling my photos in Lightroom and want to quickly see my best (i.e., 4-star or 5-star) shots—though I do sometimes prefer to create Smart Collections for this. I’ve also started using the Edit Status filter to quickly see which images I’ve edited and which remain untouched, since I have a tendency to bounce around each new set of photos and apply edits too haphazardly.
Also, eagle-eyed readers may notice that the Attribute filter offers the same options as the basic filtering features in the bottom right corner of the Library module:
In fact, these are the same! If you make an adjustment to the Attribute filters in the main Filter Bar, it’ll change the filters in the bottom right-hand corner (and vice versa).
3. Metadata
The Metadata filter gives you a grid-based view where you can filter by various metadata stored in your image files, such as camera model, lens, date, focal length, exposure settings, and more:
Each metadata filter appears as a column, and you can stack multiple columns side by side to build complex, highly specific queries.
If you have images from multiple shoots or clients stored in a single folder, the Metadata filter can instantly separate them by date, camera, or any other accessible property. However, its effectiveness depends entirely on the completeness of the metadata. If your images were stripped of EXIF data during export or import, or if your workflow involved scans or legacy files without metadata, the panel may return no results at all.
I often sift through large batches of photos from multi-day trips using the Date option in the Metadata filter; it’s a straightforward way for me to separate out images taken on different days but imported in the same batch. But I have run into the occasional issue when using the Date filter on files taken with rented cameras—I often forget to set the date correctly, and as a result, I’ll be stuck sorting through images that were supposedly taken in 1904.
At the end of the day, I do think the Metadata filter is a reliable way to slice through a large Lightroom Classic catalog. But again, it depends on whether the relevant data exists in your files.
Facial Recognition in Lightroom Classic
Photographers sometimes ask me about native facial recognition tools in Lightroom Classic.
“It technically already exists,” I tell them. “But it’s a lot less capable than you’d expect.”
You see, Lightroom Classic also includes a People feature, which is powered by facial recognition and lets you apply tags to the faces in your images.
You can access it by clicking the People view at the bottom of your screen:
The idea here is that you can click on a set of images and head into the People view. Then you can have Lightroom scan the files and group together similar faces, which you can then name:
After you tag a few faces manually, Lightroom will attempt to identify faces automatically.
In theory, this is a great feature, since you can head into the People view and quickly find specific individuals in your archives.
But whenever I’ve tried Lightroom’s facial recognition, I’ve been so disappointed. It’s not good at grouping together similar faces, and the “trained” name suggestions are often wildly off the mark.
For instance, when I had Lightroom Classic scan a set of images of a person and a dog, the program struggled to differentiate between the two.
So yes, Lightroom Classic does offer facial recognition and people tagging. The limitations are significant enough, however, that I don’t use these features in my own image search and organization workflows—and if you’re a serious portrait, wedding, or event photographer who could benefit from powerful facial recognition capabilities, I’d highly recommend investing in the Excire Search plugin (more on that below!).
The Limitations of Lightroom’s Search Tools
Lightroom Classic gives you a decent toolkit for searching your catalog. But all of these features have something in common:
They depend on the existing image data.
If your images lack metadata, or if you haven’t taken the time to tag each file with descriptive keywords, then Lightroom’s built-in tools may be of limited assistance, especially if you’re searching for specific files in hundreds of thousands of images.
But you don’t have to give up on Lightroom Classic. Instead, you can enhance your existing LrC software with a plugin such as Excire Search.
A Better Way to Find Photos in Lightroom Classic: Excire Search
Excire Search is a Lightroom Classic plugin that brings powerful AI-based search tools directly into Adobe’s interface. It analyzes your images using machine learning models, which allow you to search quickly and intuitively without relying on metadata.
I myself have been using the Excire Search plugin for almost two years now (I started with Excire Search 2022, then switched to Excire Search 2024 when it debuted early last year). The difference is astonishing. I’ve stopped using Lightroom’s native Text filter entirely when searching for photos, and while I do still work with the Metadata and Attribute filters, it’s never to look for specific files, but instead to divide broader sets of images into smaller sections.
Note: Excire Search is a paid plugin. However, you can always test it for 14 days with a free trial.
Briefly, once you download Excire Search and install the plugin, you’ll find its set of tools under Library>Plug-in Extras:
You’ll want to start by choosing the Initialize Photos option:
And then make sure that you select your whole catalog for analysis.
Let the program run for a few hours (or overnight, depending on the number of images you have in your catalog and the performance of your PC).
Once it’s done, your entire Lightroom Classic catalog will be searchable via a variety of tools, including:
Search by Text Prompt
The Search by Text Prompt tool lets you type in plain English (or German) searches, then returns the corresponding photos based on AI content recognition. For example, you could type in “Red flowers in a field” or “Urban landscape at night,” and Excire would retrieve the relevant photos from your catalog.
Search by Text Prompt is my favorite method of finding specific photos in Lightroom Classic. It rarely lets me down, and I’ve been especially impressed when looking for my wildlife photos; it does a surprisingly good job of recognizing bird and mammal species.
Search by Keyword
The Search by Keyword tool lets you sort and filter your catalog using keywords—and since Excire automatically generates keywords for every photo in your catalog, you don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting.
(Also, you can choose whether Excire’s keywords should appear in Lightroom Classic’s Keywording panel or only be accessible through the Search by Keyword tool.)
Search for People and Search for Faces
While Lightroom Classic does include facial recognition, Excire offers its own people-finding tools, and I’ve found them to be far more effective than LrC’s native features.
Excire’s Search for People tool lets you select an initial image containing a person, then find the other images in your catalog that contain the same individual.
The Search for Faces tool works slightly differently. You dial in various attributes—number of people, age group, gender, whether the person is smiling, etc.—and Excire retrieves the images that match your criteria.
These tools are fast, and they’re accurate, too. If you’re a portrait or event photographer, they’ll be invaluable. And even if you’re not a people-photography specialist, you may find yourself gravitating toward these people-search tools simply when looking for images of family and friends.
Search by Example Photo
While Excire Search offers several more handy tools for search and organization, I want to highlight one more: Search by Example Photo, also known as similarity search.
With similarity search, you select a reference photo, then Excire returns other images in your catalog that are similar (based on either color or content).
I sometimes use the similarity search tool when I’ve already selected one image that I like and want to find a few more that would complement the first (for an Instagram carousel or a portfolio page). I’ll also use it when I’ve found one photo of a subject and I want to see other shots with the same content; that way, I can decide whether I’ve done the subject justice, and which (if any) image is worth displaying.
Find Your Photos Effectively in Lightroom Classic
Lightroom Classic offers a few useful tools for searching your catalog. Finding photos is possible with the Filter Bar, especially if you’ve done lots of keywording in advance, and you can use the Sort Bar to order your images as needed.
However, if your catalog is large and/or disorganized, the built-in LrC search tools come up short. Fortunately, Excire Search steps in where Lightroom leaves off. With AI keywording, prompt search, face recognition, and visual similarity tools, you can find specific photos in just a few seconds, even if you don’t remember when, where, or how they were taken.
So go download your Excire Search 2024 free trial—and good luck finding those photos!