How to Find Any Photo, Even if Your Portfolio Has Millions of Them

Jun 29, 2023

Jemma Pollari

With digital portfolios going back 20 years or more, it can be hard to get into the back catalog and find old treasures, lost memories, and beloved favorites. With Mylio Photos QuickFilters and new SmartTags, it’s much easier to browse — and enjoy! — your entire photo collection.

Full disclosure: This sponsored article is brought to you by Mylio Photos

I love the speed with which Mylio Photos makes diving into your photo collection possible. Since giving up my amateur ways, I have a rigorously organized photo collection on disk, and Mylio Photos’s new folder tree view represents this in an easy-to-browse format.

The new Mylio Photos folder tree view lets you see your collection in a familiar format.

However, one of the great things about Mylio Photos is being able to explore your collection in different ways. Browsing by People, Location, and LifeCalendar have been around for a while, but the new SmartTags in the V22.2 release of Mylio Photos makes it easier than ever to track down images in those “I know I have a photo of that, but where is it?” moments!

How to Find Photos With a Certain Person in Them in a Certain Date Range

Mylio Photos People view is powerful and fun, and now you can stack SmartTags and People tags to create powerful QuickFilters. Like many things in Mylio Photos, there’s more than one way to find what you need.

Let’s look at an example: I need a photo of myself for an upcoming family reunion, which must be from this year.

I can start in People view, click myself, and then apply the QuickFilter for the date range:

People > Jemma Pollari > QuickFilters > By Date > By Date Range > This Year. Voila — plenty of photos to choose from.

Filtering by person and date range instantly brings up all the photos you need.

It’s also possible to do the same thing from the All Photos view: In this view, choose both variables in the QuickFilter:

QuickFilters > By Person > Jemma Pollari > By Date > By Date Range > This Year

I can choose my photo for the reunion and get it to where it needs to go: Export it, Download it from the disk to my Mylio folder, or Share it via email.
And one of the best parts, both QuickFilters and SmartTags are available for free in Mylio Photos. These features work equally well on your computer, smartphone, or tablet.

Found: A recent photo of me in about three clicks.

How to Make a New Event With Photos You Find

While here with these photos, I want to create a new Event to group these photos together. Mylio Photos can compare to a linked calendar to automatically create Events, but I will do it manually here. I select the photos I want first:

Right-click > Add to new event

Creating an Event in Mylio Photos automatically grabs all the other photos from the date range specified and adds them to the Event. This is perfect for collecting photos from mobile devices, laptops, and so on, all in one place.

Now that I’ve created that Event, any photos which fall within the date range will be automatically added. I can see the Event marked on my 2023 tile in Calendar view.

Clicking the event name opens it up, and I can see all the photos that happened that weekend.

All the photos from the Event I’ve created are automatically grouped so they can be viewed.

Events are a great Mylio Photos feature that automatically makes it possible to group photos in the Calendar. Create a Mylio Event for the dates of your last family holiday, and all photos from that range will be pulled automatically into the Event.

How to View All the Photos of a Person in the Calendar View

While finding photos of myself, I can switch that view back into the LifeCalendar and browse back in time. In QuickFilters, I will pin my name as a filter and then switch to the Calendar view.

This QuickFilter view of the Calendar only shows photos of me, which will be maintained as I click on a month, on a day, etc. The QuickFilter applies across the view, making narrowing down and finding specific photos easy.

Now I’m just seeing photos of myself throughout the ages.

How Do You Find a Photo When You Roughly Remember What You Were Wearing?

The Mylio Photos SmartTags include a category for Color, meaning you can find photos based on a vague memory of what you were wearing on a given day!

If you can’t remember when or where, but you know you were wearing that red dress, then click into SmartTags and build a filter for red:

QuickFilters > By SmartTag > Visual Properties > Color > Red

Stack your name tag to your filter (found in the By Person item of QuickFilters), and you’ll pull all photos of you that include red.

The SmartTag automatically detects that there is red in this photo, so I can find this photo based on vaguely remembering what I was wearing on the day.

Right-click the photo and select Show in Folder to open the other photos that go with it.

How to Find Photos of Specific Things and Animals Like Books, Car Wheels, and Cats

SmartTags identify what’s in a photo (and this is all done locally, so no data is sent to cloud servers), so you can use SmartTags to find photos with cats…

QuickFilters > By SmartTag > Animal > Cat

The cat SmartTag has been auto-added to this photo, making it easier to get photos of your cats onto the internet!

Or with things:

QuickFilters > By SmartTag > Thing > Book Jacket

I love taking these slightly styled photos of the books I’m reading, so this SmartTag makes it easy to grab them together when I’m ready to post on social media.

Finding Photos With Flags, Ratings, and Labels From Other Programs

If you use a star rating, flag, or label system to process your photos, then finding the images in your portfolio that have been edited is quickly done with QuickFilters.

In the Folders view, I’m finding green-labeled photos here:

QuickFilters > By Rating, Label, and Flag

This filters out all the folders that don’t contain any green-flagged photos. I know then that I’m getting ones that have been edited and marked green.

I rate my finished and best photos with stars as part of my editing process (but never my phone photos), so this is an excellent tool for sorting my portfolio into an edited-only view.

Inverting the results gets me everything that isn’t yet edited. This helps me find what’s left in my (very long) editing queue.

Inverting the QuickFilter is a powerful way of changing views for different purposes.

Another useful feature highlighted above is the Don’t Show in Calendar option. This turns off a folder from displaying in Calendar, Events, or Slideshows. I use this for photoshoots done for other studios as a contractor and for some client work. Great for keeping your Calendar clean and showing what you need to see.

Keeping what you want in the Calendar is done by toggling the Don’t Show in Calendar option.

Linking the QuickFilter Across All Views

When working in one view like All Photos, People, or Folders, the QuickFilter you build stays in that view, however, you can Link QuickFilters across all views with the toggle in the top right.

Linking the QuickFilter keeps the filter active across all views instead of only in the active view.

This lets you see the same combination of filters when switching from People to Folders to All Photos, making it even easier to find any photo in your portfolio.

Getting Advanced: Finding Any Photo With Advanced Searching

Because Mylio Photos makes it possible to explore your whole photo collection from everywhere and everywhen, you can be sure there’s a way (or two or three) to find every photo in your collection. All Photos and the Folders view are good places to start when building up your QuickFilters.

Depending on what you need to find, starting in All Photos or the Folder view is an excellent place to start building a QuickFilter.

The advanced search terms have endless potential to find the exact photo you need. For those familiar with Boolean logic, these tools will come as second nature. For everyone else, there’s this helpful guide to craft your terms.

Using the advanced filters in By Custom, you can build powerful Boolean logic filters for your photos.

For example, I want to clean up my untagged photos with GPS coordinates. Using the search term gpstagged: false will bring up all photos in a Folder, Calendar day, etc. (or in All Photos) that don’t have GPS data.

I can now find the location in the Places section of the Info tab. Then, drag my photos over to apply location data.

Drag the photo to the map to geo-tag it, then click the compass icon to explore the map around where your photo was taken.

Now I can go from this newly geotagged photo to explore other photos from the exact location. This “map view” groups photos by geo-tags.

It’s a lot of fun to browse the map and see what happened at different locations.

QuickFilters and SmartTags in Mylio Photos make finding any photo in your portfolio easier.

Finding photos you’d forgotten — or ones you remember but had forgotten where they are — is part of the fun of exploring a giant portfolio of digital photos.

My photo collection runs into the several hundred thousand. I have been uncovering photos I haven’t thought of in years with Mylio Photos’s filtering tools.

As Mylio Photos adds more and more tools to the photography tool, I’m excited to see how I can take my photos further without relying on cloud storage and manual organization.

You can download Mylio Photos for free from mylio.com

Full disclosure: This sponsored article was brought to you by Mylio Photos