How can I search photos by EXIF tags?

Question

I want to be able to find a specific photo in my huge archive, so I put some tags in the EXIF header.

The problem is: How can I search for a file that contains a specific tag (eg. "sky")?

Can anyone help me out?

Solution 1

I found one way in Windows 8:

In the search bar, enter tags:yourtag, in my example it would be tags:sky.

Solution 2

I use totalcommander for most file related task. It has a very powerful search engine. One feature is that it can search for exif data. This feature is activated by installing a 'plugin' file from a number that are available. The program itself is a shareware and can be licensed at a very reasonable price. Really helpful for a lot of other tasks. I actually never use the 'file explorer' of windows.

Comments

[Uwe Keim]

In Windows 10, it seems that you don't even need the tags: prefix.

[Remus Rigo]

this is how i'm searching: *.jpg tag:sky and it works (if the tags are written inside the jpg file)

[Frank Nocke]

Workds in Win10 für JPEG images, ignores raw Files (where the tags resides in .xmp sidecars.)

[Remus Rigo]

if you install nef codecs from nikon, you can write tags inside the nef files nikonimglib.com/nefcodec

[Remus Rigo]

i'm using TC from a long long time, but in explorer it is very simple, if I want to search the tag cat from a jpg file, all I have to do is to search for *.jpg tag:cat