If you have entered comments and keywords for your pictures and groups, you can find pictures by searching for known words. Right-click on a group in which you want to search (use the root group unless you know better) and select Search or mark....
In the following dialog you can enter some words (all of them need to be found) and select some options which allow better control over the search. In the end you get a new window which shows the result of your search. It contains all items of the group initially selected which matched the search. It is possible to search in the new window again.
Words have to be separated by comma (',').
The search dialog does also display a tree of keywords used in the selected group and below.
While typing, the browser below the input line might highlight a line in the keyword hierarchy matching what you have typed so far. If this is what you want to enter anyway, just type in two dots ('..') and the word will be completed.It is also possible to just mark pictures matching your search without opening a new window showing them. This action is not recursive, but only applies to the selected group.
When adding keywords to pictures and groups, you can write down plain keywords of course. I do so for people's names. But things become difficult when something does not have a unique name.
Lets assume you have some pictures of a friend's house. You want to add a keyword. Do you use Fred's house, house of family Einstein or something else? No matter what you use, it will be difficult to remember when you search for it. A notation to solve this problem looks like this (a few examples):
- s -> some scenery
- s.mount_everest -> a special scenery
- e.cycling -> anything about cycling
- e.cycling.tour de france
- p.tommy -> Tommy!
- p.einstein.albert
- p.einstein.his wife
- o.house.family munster
- o.house.peter
- o.house.peter.garage
A keyword must not contain comma (',') and might be hierarchical with a dot to separate levels (as shown in above examples). For the topmost level one might use:
- p person to be seen
- e event
- o object to be seen
- l location
- s scenery to be seen
- t town to be seen or something in this town
Now this is just some notation. But it is well supported in important parts of fotoalbum: when adding a keyword or searching for pictures, you can use a hierarchical tree which shows keywords already used. You can also replace some keyword by another one easily ("Edit keywords...", for a use case see this text).
Using a hierarchical notation makes it easy to show every picture of a house, for example. If you have used keywords like above, you could search for "o.house" to search for pictures of houses and so on.
Right-click on a group and select View chronologically. A new window opens up with all elements of the selected group, ordered by date/time. They are divided into groups.