Andy Chase

Yesterday I wrote of my surprise and annoyance at Apple for removing search by photo title in iPhoto 4. Yesterday evening it occurred to me that they didn't exactly remove it. In fact, iPhoto 4 now has a much more comprehensive search environment than previous versions.

The only catch is that to access this search feature, you have to first create a Smart Album and then use the "Where title contains" criteria.

The capability to search by just about every bit of information kept in the iPhoto database is there in the form of Smart Albums... but I still can't for the life of me understand why there's not the ability to do ad hoc searches; all they would need to add is a search field like the one at the top right of the iTunes interface, with a pulldown letting you specify that you want to search titles, comments, keywords, dates, et cetera.

This isn't even a feature that I depend on... but the absence of such an elemental feature of every other database I've ever used really gets under my skin.