Support

Searching

Type a word and search everything at once.

A contact's name also finds their photos. Type “pictures of Goy” to find the photos containing that contact and the events they attended, even if the contact is not in a bucket. “Pictures of me” works after you identify your own contact.

The home screen search box searches all object types. Type “dinner cruise” to list matching contacts, photos, videos and events.

Add photos, videos, contacts or events to search only that type. “Dinner cruise videos” returns only videos.

Tap anything in the list to open it and change it. Filler words such as “show me the” are ignored.

To speak a search, tap the microphone beside the box and say a sentence such as “show me all the pictures I have of Cecile” or “my contacts within 10 km of my current location”.

Distance searches support “within 10 km of me”, “within 2 miles of me” or “near me”. Only contacts and places with mappable addresses are included, closest first.

Distance searches and the Map are premium features, turned on in Settings under Premium features.

When a phrase returns no results, Buckets offers similar names. For example, “Cecil” may suggest Cecile. Tap a suggestion to search it.

Dates and relationships are understood too: “photos from last May”, “my brothers”, “Jane’s employees”. The Complex Searching section of Help describes how to frame a precise request.

One word can match several buckets. Type “Vancouver” when you have Family Trip 2023 Vancouver and Team Week Spring 2024 Vancouver. Select one bucket, select multiple buckets or choose All of them.

Place words are read only after “in”, “at”, “within” or “near”, and every word up to the next one of those is the place: “Emily in French Quarter with Me” is Emily and you, taken in the French Quarter. “Bank of America” on its own is a name, not a place. “with” adds a person and every named person has to be in the picture: “Jake in Lou’s Diner with Me” finds only the photos of Jake and you together, taken there.

A place finds only what the phone has placed: photos whose position it read off the picture and named on the map, and contacts whose address it found on the map. A venue with no geotagged photo and no contact or bucket of its own is not searchable, so make a contact or a bucket for the places you want to search. An official name such as “New York County” is read as the common one, New York. When a place is not known, Buckets says so and offers the places it does know that sound like it, or the same words as a plain search.