Search

Type what you remember. Frameleaf’s smart search understands the content of photos and videos, so “dog on the beach” or “sunrise over a lake” works without any tags. You can narrow any search with filters, type filters straight into the search box, or ask a question in everyday words.

Everything runs on your own server. Your photos and your searches are never sent to an outside search service.

Open search

• Click the search box at the top of the page.
• Press Ctrl K (⌘ K on a Mac) from anywhere.
• Press / when you’re not typing in a field.

The search panel opens over the page. As you type, it shows suggestions, matching people, places and pages, and a live count of matches.

Key	Does
↑ and ↓	Move through suggestions and results
Enter	Open the highlighted item
Tab	Complete the highlighted suggestion
Ctrl Enter (⌘ Enter on a Mac)	Show all results
Esc	Close the panel

Start with > to switch to the command palette and jump to a page, a setting, a person or a place instead of searching.

Search modes

The mode menu at the left of the search box chooses what your words are matched against:

Mode	Searches
Smart search	The content of photos and videos, by meaning. The default.
All text	File names, descriptions, text in photos and folder paths, all at once
Filename	Full or partial file names, or the extension
Description	Descriptions, including AI descriptions
Text in photos	Words read from signs, receipts, documents and screenshots
Full path	Full or partial folder names from the original path

The text modes match anywhere in the field, and ignore capitals and accents, so cafe finds Café. For example, in Full path, searching for Projects, 3D, Printing or 2026 all find a photo stored at /John/Projects/3D_Printing/2026-07-01/IMG_0001.jpg.

Text in photos is more forgiving: it matches words that are close to what you typed, which helps when the text recognition misread a letter.

Smart search

Smart search compares your words with what’s actually in each photo and video, using a CLIP model on your server. You don’t need tags or captions: birthday cake with candles, snow in the mountains or red car at night all work.

Results are ranked by how well they match. Frameleaf also gives a boost to photos whose description or recognised text contains your words, so a receipt that says “Whole Foods” rises when you search for it, even if it looks like any other receipt.

A few tips:

• Describe what you’d see, not what it means to you: girl blowing out candles rather than Emma's 5th.
• Add a filter for the part a picture can’t show, such as a person, a place or a date. See Search syntax.
• Smart search ranks matches rather than filtering them, so a long list of results gets less relevant towards the end.

Find similar photos

Open a photo and choose Find similar from the viewer’s menu to search for photos that look like it. The search panel shows the photo as Similar to a photo, and you can add filters on top.

Video moments

Searches also show Moments in your videos above the results: video frames that match your words by meaning, and moments you’ve added whose title or transcript contains them. Only your own videos are searched. See Video moments.

Ask about your photos

Open the Search page with nothing typed to see Ask about your photos. Type a question in everyday words, or pick one of the examples:

• photos of Alice in Banff last summer
• receipts from 2024
• screenshots from last month
• favorite videos since 2020
• photos from April 2024

Frameleaf turns the question into search filters, runs it, and shows What Frameleaf searched for so you can see how it read your question. Ask is meant for discovery; it doesn’t sync with any other photo service.

What Ask understands

You write	Ask uses
today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, last month, this year, last year	That date range
A year, such as 2024	That whole year
last summer	June to August of last year
A month, such as April or April 2024	That month (this year if you leave the year out)
since 2020, after 2020, before 2020	An open-ended date range
since April 2024, before April 2024	An open-ended range from the start of that month
favorite, favorites, starred	Favourites only
video, videos, movie	Videos only
photo, photos, picture, image	Photos only
in, near, around or at, then a place	That city
with or of, then names	Those people or pets
receipt, invoice	Text in photos that looks like a receipt
screenshot	Files with “Screenshot” in the name
document, paperwork, form	Text in photos that looks like a document
ID, passport, license, medical, legal	Text in photos matching your words

Everything else in the question goes to smart search.

People, pets and places in a question

Names after with or of are matched against the people and pets you’ve named. Separate several names with and, & or commas: photos of Alice and Sam at the lake. An exact name wins, a person before a pet; otherwise Frameleaf picks the closest name. Hidden people never match, and neither do Locked ones until you unlock.

If a name can’t be matched to anyone, the search still runs and Frameleaf says the person match is approximate.

A place only works when it’s a real city name. Phrases such as “my hometown” or “the beach” aren’t used as a place; Frameleaf tells you and searches without a location instead.

Receipts, documents and screenshots are found using the text in them and file names, so these questions skip smart search.

Note

Ask returns up to 100 matches by default. If Ask is turned off on your server, the Search page says so. Administrators control both under Administration, then Settings, then Machine Learning Settings, then Search models & suggested tags.

Filters

Click Advanced in the search panel, or Filter in a results toolbar, to open the full filter panel. Every choice shows how many items match it in the current search.

Section	Filters
People	People recognised in your photos. Choose whether results include All of them, Any of them, or Exclude them.
Pets	Your named pets, once you have one
Media type	All, Photos or Videos
Capture date	From and Through dates
Places	Country, state and city
Rating & favorites	Star rating (exactly, or at least), Rejected, Unrated, No rating metadata, and favourites
Tags	Your tags, including tags read from your files
Albums	One or more albums
Camera & lens	Camera brand, camera model and lens model
Text & descriptions	Photos with No description or where description Generation failed
Sensitivity review	Results of sensitive-content detection: Reviewed, Needs review, Overridden, Flagged as sensitive, Check failed, Not checked
Library status	Not in any album, Untagged, visibility, Has people, In an album, Has tags, Motion and Offline

Reset filters clears them all. Filters you set in the panel and filters you type in the search box are the same thing: picking a person in the panel replaces a typed person: filter for the same field, so the two never disagree.

The Text & descriptions and Sensitivity review sections only matter when your administrator has turned on AI descriptions or sensitive-content detection.

Matches by date

While you search, the panel shows a bar chart of matches by day, month or year, depending on how far apart they are. Click a bar to narrow the search to that period.

Where you search from

If you start a search from inside an album, a pet’s page or a shared space, the search panel offers that collection and Entire library, each with its count. Pick one before you show results.

Results

The results page shows your filters as chips across the top. Click a chip’s cross to remove it, or Clear all. From the toolbar you can sort, switch between grid and list, start a slideshow, and see results on a map.

Search links keep your whole search, so you can bookmark one or come back to it with the browser’s Back button.

Recent and saved searches

The search panel remembers your last five searches under Recent.

To keep a search, choose Save search and pick what to make:

Option	What you get
Smart album	An album that keeps updating as new photos match. See Albums.
Album snapshot	An ordinary album with exactly the items that match now. You see the count before it’s made.
Saved search	The search itself, to run again from search and the sidebar

You can keep up to 50 saved searches, each with a name of up to 100 characters. Saving with a name you already used replaces that search.

Only searches by people, tags, media type, dates and smart search can become a smart album. Anything else, such as an exclusion, a place, a camera or a rating, would change what the album matches, so Frameleaf tells you instead of guessing.

A snapshot of a smart search saves the top ranked matches, because smart search ranks rather than filters.

Saved and recent searches store references to people, pets and tags, never their names. A saved search that names something Locked is left out of the list until you unlock.

Private by design

Search runs entirely on your server. Smart search uses a local CLIP model, and that never moves to the cloud, even with Frameleaf Cloud linked. Locked items only appear in your results, counts and suggestions after you unlock your session.

For administrators

Smart search, text recognition and Ask Search are set up in Administration, then Settings, then Machine Learning Settings:

Section	Setting	Default
Smart Search	Enable smart search	On
Smart Search	CLIP model	ViT-B-16-SigLIP-384__webli
OCR	Enable OCR	On
OCR	OCR model	PP-OCRv5_mobile
Search models & suggested tags	Enable Ask Search	On
Search models & suggested tags	Maximum Ask Search results	100 (1 to 1,000)

To search in another language, or to get better results on stronger hardware, see Choose a smart search model.

After you change the CLIP model, run Smart Search, then All, from Administration, then Jobs. After you change the OCR model, run the text recognition job for all photos.

Text recognition models

Model	Reads
PP-OCRv5_server	Chinese, Japanese and English, more accurately but more slowly
PP-OCRv5_mobile	Chinese, Japanese and English
EN__PP-OCRv5_mobile	English only
EL__PP-OCRv5_mobile	Greek and English
KOREAN__PP-OCRv5_mobile	Korean and English
LATIN__PP-OCRv5_mobile	Latin script languages
ESLAV__PP-OCRv5_mobile	Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and English
TH__PP-OCRv5_mobile	Thai and English

The OCR section also has Minimum detection score (default 0.5), Minimum recognition score (default 0.8) and Maximum resolution (default 736). Lower scores read more text but make more mistakes; a higher resolution is more accurate but slower.