Describe the photo.
Find the photo.
You remember the picture perfectly. What nobody remembers is the folder, the filename, or the year. Type what you remember into Cortex and the collection narrows to it, including the part of the sentence that is a person rather than a thing.
- Type a thing, a place, an occasion, a decade, a person
- Who the query is about is resolved before anything else
- The row above the results names who it understood
- Tap a name to drop that person and search again
- Refine Your Search narrows what came back
What can I type into search?
Whatever you remember. A thing in the frame, a place, an occasion, a decade, a person, or several of those in one line. There is no query language to learn and no field to pick first.
While you type, suggestions come back grouped as People, Locations, Events and Timeline, all of them drawn from your own collection rather than a generic list. Take one and it becomes the search, or keep typing and ignore them.
How does it know who Dad is?
Because someone in your family wrote it down once. Cortex resolves WHO a query is about before it searches for WHAT it is about. A name resolves directly, a nickname resolves to the person who answers to it, and a kin word resolves through the relationship recorded on that person: dad, mom, nana, gramps, yiayia and papou all land on a real row in your roster.
Those words are then lifted out of the query. "dad at the beach" searches for "at the beach" and narrows the answer to photos that carry Dad, rather than hoping a description of the picture somehow knows who Dad is. When the query is nothing but people, nothing is searched at all: the name is the whole question.
The result set opens with a row that says Showing photos of and names who it understood, beside the words it actually searched. If a family has two grandmothers, the chip shows the word you typed instead of one name, because those photos carry either of them and naming one would overpromise. Tap the chip and that person drops out of the query and the search runs again.
Do I have to tag my photos first?
Not for what is in the picture. Every photograph is read on the way in, so a beach, a birthday cake or a red convertible is findable with nothing typed on your side.
People are the exception. A face nobody has named cannot be reached by name, and "dad" only works once someone records that relationship. Naming faces is the one piece of work your family does, and search sits downstream of it. Two people in one frame is a filter of its own.
What will search not do?
It searches one collection at a time. A family that keeps two runs two searches, and there is no query that spans both.
It matches whole words. A roster Dimitri will not answer a search for Dimitrios, and a nickname nobody entered is just a word in a sentence.
It over-matches common-word names on purpose. A family with a Rose and a May will watch "rose bush in may" resolve as two people. That is survivable rather than clever: when the person-scoped search comes back with nothing, the query runs again unscoped, so a wrong guess can never empty your results.
A pet's relationship is deliberately not a search term. Type "dog" and you get photos with a dog in them, not the one dog on your roster. The pet is still there by name.
And when nothing in the collection is close enough to what you typed, you get nothing back rather than the nearest miss. An empty result is a real answer about your collection.
Do I keep what I paid for?
You buy a collection once. It is not a subscription, and nothing you have paid for is taken back from you later.
Search is one of the interactive exhibits the Exhibition Pass keeps open, alongside the Timeline, the Atlas and Connections. Your photos, the family and decade browsers, sharing and export never need the Pass, and downloading your photos in full resolution is never gated and never charged. See pricing.
Back to what Phossil does. Everything search returns has a date behind it, which is the same axis the Timeline draws, and a box of prints becomes searchable a scan at a time.