Help: Advanced Search

Advanced Search finds photos by description rather than by filename or keyword — “red sports car in front of a garage” instead of remembering which shoot it was in. Results land in a new Lightroom collection.

Open advanced search

In Lightroom Classic:

• Library → Plug-in Extras → Advanced Search...

What the search can see

A text search only finds photos that carry a SigLIP embedding, so a half-indexed catalog answers “no results” for a subject that is sitting right there. The dialog says so before you type: if the search model is not downloaded, or some of the catalog has no search index yet, an orange note at the top gives the count and what to run to fix it. After an update that switches to a new AI search model, photos indexed with the old one count as not searchable too, and the note names them separately: run Analyze & Index Photos with Enable smart photo search again and they are brought up to date.

The check is two cheap lookups (/v1/db/stats plus the catalog’s photo count) and runs every time the dialog opens. It is a note, not a gate — the search still runs across whatever is indexed.

Search term

Free text, or empty to list your best photos: with no term the search ranks everything in scope by its Aesthetic score and gives you the best ones (up to Max results), optionally restricted by the controls under Ranking. Photos that have no score yet are not part of that list; the dialog says how many, and Analyze & Index Photos fills them in.

With a term, describe what is in the photo, not how it was shot:

• red sports car in front of a garage
• sunset over mountains with orange sky
• two people laughing at a wooden table

The field is also a drop-down: its menu lists your last 15 searches, most recent first, so a search you run again after indexing more photos is one click rather than retyped. Pick one and edit it, or type over it as usual.

Search scope

• All photos — everything indexed in the backend
• Current view — the folder or collection currently open
• Selected photos — the current selection only

Ranking

• Sort by — Relevance (the default for a search with a term), Aesthetic score, or Relevance and aesthetic score, which mixes the two evenly. Without a term the order is always the aesthetic score.
• Minimum aesthetic score — drop photos scored below this, from 1.0 to 9.0 in half-points; Off at the left end. Typical photos sit between about 4.5 and 7; treat it as a way to sort and thin out your own photos, not as a verdict.
• Genre — only photos of one genre (landscape, portrait, street, wildlife & animals, sport, event & wedding, architecture, macro, food, product & still life, astro & night sky, concert & stage, aerial, or Other). The genre is a guess from the picture, made when the photo is indexed.

Photos with no score (or no genre) cannot pass a minimum (or a genre filter), and the search says how many it left out for that reason. The collection’s name says what shaped it, for example Best 50 · ≥7.0 · Landscape @ ….

Tuning

Relevance strictness (0–100)

How aggressively weak matches are dropped. 0 turns filtering off and returns the full ranked list; 50 is moderate; 100 keeps only strong matches. The filter looks for the point where result scores fall off a cliff and cuts there, so a strict setting on a query with many good matches still returns many results.

Max results (50–1000)

Upper bound on how many photos end up in the collection, across both halves of the search. Default 100.

Search in

At least one of these has to be on:

• Semantic (AI search) — matches the meaning of the query against the image embedding. Requires the photos to have been indexed with Create search embeddings, and the SigLIP model to be downloaded.
• Metadata — plain substring matching against the AI-generated fields. Each field can be switched on separately: Keywords, Caption, Title, Alt text. Photos need AI metadata for this to find anything.

Semantic matches are ranked by similarity and come first; metadata matches fill whatever is left of Max results.

Results

The plugin creates a collection under the Search Results collection set, named after the query and scope.

Set the collection sort order to Custom Order — that is the only order in which Lightroom shows the best matches at the top. Any other sort order throws the ranking away.

If the search matched photos that are no longer in the catalog, a Search Results Are Incomplete message says how many. Those are usually photos you deleted from Lightroom that are still in the index: when the automatic index cleanup is on, the message also says that a cleanup has started in the background, and the next search no longer finds them (see the FAQ).