You know the photo exists, just not what it's called: how to find it on your computer

It's one of those searches that starts calmly and ends in a bad mood.

You need that photo. The birthday on the terrace, with the eight o'clock light and the cake still whole. Or the dish that came out perfect in the restaurant's first week. Or the hand-written sign someone photographed at a trade fair two years ago. You can see it in every detail. You know it's on the computer.

Then you open a folder called Photos 2023, another called New folder (3), an external drive called BACKUP_GOOD, and you're looking at two thousand files called IMG_4821.jpg.

The problem isn't that you're messy. It's that we remember photos by what's in them, and computers store them by what they're called. Those two almost never meet. This article is about bringing them together, from the quickest option to the most complete.

First, what you already have: File Explorer

Before installing anything, get the most out of what ships with Windows. Explorer doesn't know what's inside a photo, but it knows a lot around it, and sometimes that's enough.

• Search from the highest folder you can. If you search inside Photos 2023 and the photo ended up in Downloads, you won't see it. Start at This PC or the root of the external drive.
• Filter by type and date. After typing something in the search box (even .jpg), Search options lets you keep only images and narrow by date modified. If you know it was "last summer", you've ruled out ninety per cent.
• Switch to large icons. Obvious, but it's what helps most: your memory recognises the image in a split second; reading file names does nothing for it.
• Sort by date taken. Many photos store when they were shot, not just when they were copied. If the Date taken column isn't there, right-click the column header and add it.

This works when you remember when it was. It fails when you only remember what was in it — which, unfortunately, is the usual case.

A note: on recent Copilot+ PCs, Windows has started to allow search by description in File Explorer and the Photos app. If your machine is one of them, try it before reading on. On other computers, Windows search still looks at names, dates and tags.

The phone route: Google Photos (and its conditions)

If you've ever typed "beach" or "dog" into Google Photos and got exactly that, you know searching by content is possible. Google Photos recognises objects, places, faces and even text inside images.

The condition is that your photos have to be in Google. For phone photos, which upload themselves, that's great. For years of archive living on your computer and three external drives, it means uploading everything, paying for space once you pass the free tier, and accepting that your archive lives on someone else's servers.

For many people that's fine. For others it isn't: client photos, photos of children, work under confidentiality agreements, or simply too many gigabytes of video. And there's the practical detail: with two terabytes of material, the upload isn't an afternoon, it's a week.

Searching by description, without uploading anything

The third way is the one we felt was missing, which is why we built it: let the computer look through your folders, understand what's in each image and let you search the way you'd say it out loud.

In the Polimake desktop app, free for this use, you choose the folders (external drives too) and the app goes through them on your own computer. From then on you type things like:

• "birthday cake on a terrace at sunset"
• "rice dish seen from above, wooden table"
• "hand-written sign with prices"
• "two people laughing in a kitchen"

And they show up. Not because someone tagged them, but because the app has looked at the image. Three details that, in practice, people appreciate most:

It reads the text in the photo. The sign, a menu board, a slide photographed at a conference. Search for a word that was written there and it finds it.

It also searches inside videos. If what you remember is a moment in a video rather than a photo, it takes you to the exact second. And if you remember something someone said, that works too: transcription runs with Whisper on your machine.

Nothing leaves your computer. The analysis is local. No upload, no mandatory account, and it works offline once installed.

To be fair, here's what it doesn't do. The first pass over a large archive takes time, because your computer is genuinely looking at thousands of images; let it work overnight. And for now there's only a Windows version.

What helps (even though nobody does it)

It would be odd to write about this without mentioning good habits. Here are the three that really pay off, from least to most effort:

1. One folder per event, date first. 2024-06-15 Marta's birthday sorts itself and reads at a glance. You don't need more structure than that.
2. Delete near-duplicates the same day. Out of ten almost identical photos, keep two. It's far easier to decide with the memory fresh than three years later.
3. One master copy. Photos get lost less from disorder than from being scattered: some on the phone, some in WhatsApp, some on the old laptop. Putting them in one place is half the search done.

That said, almost nobody keeps this up, and that's fine. That's what searching by what's in the image is for: so order stops being a requirement.

And when you finally find it

Often you're looking for a photo because you want to do something with it: a card, a post, a cover, a short video with the best shots from that trip.

In the desktop app it's one click away from the video editor and the design canvas, both free and without watermarks. So the whole journey — find it, make something with it and export it — happens without leaving your computer.

Frequently asked questions

Can you search for a photo on Windows by what's in it?

On most Windows computers, no: search looks at names, dates and tags, not at what's in the image. The newest Copilot+ PCs can already search by description in File Explorer and the Photos app; on the rest, you need an app that analyzes the images.

Can I search for photos on an external hard drive?

Yes. In Windows File Explorer, start the search from the root of the drive; with a local visual search app, add the drive's folder so it gets analyzed. As long as the drive is connected, it's searched just like the rest of the computer.

Do you have to upload your photos to the internet to search them by content?

Not necessarily. Google Photos needs them in its cloud, but some apps analyze the images on your own computer. In the Polimake desktop app the analysis is local: your photos never leave the computer and, once it's installed, it works offline.

Can you search inside videos the same way as in photos?

Yes, with tools that also analyze video: you can search by what's seen, by the text that appears on screen and by what's said, thanks to the transcript, and jump to the exact moment instead of reviewing the whole video.