[Feature] Search Results organized by date (an more)

[almulder]

The feature

When doing a search it would be nice to be able see results by date and with option to select like normal viewing, (Also the select all should toggle to deselect all)

we could also add more ways to sort the search results, (By album), Missing From Albums Or specific album(s), I am sure the are many ways we can find to sort them. but defiantly need a few options.

(Just started using immich and loving it)

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[kikendo]

Yes, the current order is random and not always usable.

[alextran1502]

The order is not random but rather by the relevant score of the search term.

[kikendo]

might as well be random as that is not very useful

[bo0tzz]

It is in fact very useful when you're looking for a particular image ;)

[lorenzo-morelli]

It is great, and it's very helpful if I'm looking for a particular image. But sometimes the user just would like to filter their photos according to some parameters and they would like to keep the chronological order. I reckon it would be very useful for many people :)

[YarosMallorca]

The order is not random but rather by the relevant score of the search term.

Yes, this is useful in some cases, true, but when I know the approximate date of what I'm looking for, having a chronological timeline of the search results would be very useful.
Ideally there should be an option in the search settings to change the default order.

[Theprim0]

Here also requesting the feature of sorting by date when searching

[nick-c-liu]

Upvoting this feature⬆️

Thank you for making it possible to search! Order by relevant score by date would make it even better.

Wonder if it's feasible to add a relevant/confidence score overlay on the search results and an extra threshold filter which has a default? User can always choose to view all photos from that date.

[bran22]

I like this idea! Or also, it could work the other way too: specify a relevance-score threshold using a filter, so only photos that exceed that score would appear in the results. Then, amongst those photos, display sorted by date.

[loxoron218]

Being able to toggle the search by either context or file name permanently, instead of having to change it every time, would be awesome!

[YarosMallorca]

Are there any plans to implement this? Would be super useful!!

[Fgdou]

Yes, searching is a bit useless right now because it is not sorted by date

[kikendo]

i think this team needs a bit of help from people well versed in usability, I wonder if there's any way to assist.

[DevServs]

The search result is always a FULL selection of ALL photos, sorted by relevance to the search query. This is how the CLIP search model works. You can limit the search results by specifying the period in the filters.

[alextran1502]

@kikendo There is an option already available if you don't want to use AI search. However, you will need to populate the search data manually in the description of each photo, and then you can use Description search :) I think that will help your use case, with description search, it will only return results with matching description words

[kikendo]

Ugh deleted the previous comment because I wrote a bunch of poppycock. Sorry!
OK I understand why this is working the way it is working, thank you for the explanation.

It is still wrong in a usability perspective. I know now that this is how the CLIP model works but the results should be formed in a way the end user can find usable. Fact is, if you go to like an iPhone and do a search for "dog" (a machine-learning based search we had available at home for years, mind you), it will both show you the "most relevant" searches that match your query, and then all the images it found with a "dog", -ordered by date-. So this kind of functionality is possible somehow and it should be worked on. it's not like we're asking for something impossible.

As I said before I think the Immich team, needs usability people helping out because the smartest code in the world will not work without usability considerations. The search as you described is inherently broken from an end user perspective.

[kikendo]

@kikendo There is an option already available if you don't want to use AI search.

I made a mistake in that assessment that I now deleted, I do want to use "AI" search, we just want it sorted by criteria like date.

[DevServs]

if you go to like an iPhone

I'm sure that once the guys grow up to Apple's level, they will have an even better search. Our task is to support them! ;)

[mbuzina]

For example: There are 100 photos in the collection. One of them has a mushroom. When you search for "mushroom", the search result will be 100 photos, the first of which is most likely a mushroom. But all 100 photos will ALWAYS be in the search result.

Try creating a new account for the experiment, uploading 10-100 photos there and experimenting with the search.

I recommend getting familiar with how the CLIP models work.

Context text searches work this way, yes. For all other searches it returns a limited set of photos. For these sorting should be trivial (e.g. searching for 4-starred photos, photos with a certain person or a tag). For CLIP photos just define either a cut-of value for relevance (similar to the soft-max used in most AI models) or just get the best matching 500 (and provide an interface to change the number). Both are valid ways of adressing this issue.

EDIT: To adress your example, limiting to a usefull minimum relevance value would yield just the one photo. Or with a bit more relaxed value it will yield the top 5 photos. Only limit the relevance when not sorting by relavance.

EDIT2: Link to #20883

[Jack0070708]

I honestly can’t help but wonder what it would take for someone with actual development exposure to this project to step in and partner with @kikendo or anyone with exposure to user experience —to bring sorting by date to the search functionality. It's baffling that search results can show a 5-year-old photo next to a 1-month-old one with absolutely no logical order (yes, relevance score aside), and there's still no way for users to sort by date.

What's even more baffling, though, is how many people involved in this project still don’t see this as a significant usability issue. It’s exhausting looking at people having to spend time justifying that this gap is something worth addressing, and it’s even more frustrating when you're unable to express that concern without being dismissed or chastised by self righteousness and those who seem to think that berating others, dismissing their feedback is more valuable than improving a basic, essential feature.

And yes, before anyone jumps in with the standard spiel, I do understand and do appreciate that this is an open-source, community-driven project. I know the developers are volunteering their time, and I fully respect the dedication of the people behind this (I’ve already shown my support through donation and will continue to do so). But it’s honestly hard to ignore the pervasive sense of entitlement among some people, who act like it's their personal mission to silence any feedback. So, yes I cowardly decided to leave this here as anonymous and move on, knowing full well that the usual thumbs-down brigade will be out in full force. I won’t be reading any of it, but I hope someone will eventually take this seriously.

[nick-c-liu]

@bo0tzz Thanks for clarifying that!

Using the example from Mert where the distance ranges from .86-1.00 (if we only take the middle/top 80% of the results returned). If real-fine adjustments are needed, could we normalize this range to something like 0.00 - 100.00 and provide the user a slider plus a text entry option (for precise inputs)?

Anyways, I believe most users here are okay with getting irrelevant search results as long as we can see results grouped/ordered by date, and having the ability to adjust the cutoff. I hope this makes sense. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the issue here.

[shaul75]

I'm just asking if the cosine distance or similarity score could be exposed in the UI as a way to filter the returned results.

What Mert is saying is that even if it is exposed, the cutoff is so sensitive that you can't reasonably set it correctly by hand.

No, the threshold depends on the specific query.

Do you know off the top of your head what the threshold for "beach" should be? Here's a chart to make it easier:

Answer

What about "kite"?

Answer

Every query is different and the threshold being off by just 0.01 is enough to cleave off hundreds of relevant assets or include hundreds of irrelevant assets.

The cut off doesn't have to be "perfect" for all queries.
as long as the admin/user can control it, why not? there's always an arbitrary minimum relevancy where anything below that is just entirely irrelevant.
There's also a distinction between a filter and a sort by, everything else in the UI is a filter and this currently behaves as a "sort by ML relevancy".

[DrSpaldo]

I really hope this is considered, this is one of the things that has bugged me about Immich for as long as I can remember.

Even if there were an option in the search result;

• by relevance (allows results for almost all photos)
• by date (allows say xx amount of results or xx% match)

[eigan]

If the problem is with the "context" search and relevance. How about starting with allowing sort or (imo better) show the timeline if no context is used in the query?

It really weird that, when chosing to show images between dates, or a face, they are all in messed up order. Same with the other available params in the advanced search.

A nice later feature could then be to allow range-selection from the timeline with shift-click (keyDown = start, keyUp = end).

[johansmolinski]

To me it looks like you could define the cutoff by an angle of the tangent on the curve, possibly by a configurable value. For instance, for the curves above I think 45 degrees looks fair (about .89 for beach and .91 for kite). Maybe the math is tricky to implement, and maybe it would not apply for all keywords, who knows. Just an idea.

[KasiBurnsRed]

this feature would be great. maybe by a adjustable score filter on the clip results followed by the ordering by (date)

[emmertex]

It would also be good, primarily for API reasons, to set thresholds on match confidence.

I tried to make a automatic image classifier externally, but without knowing the confidence, or setting thresholds, this is not currently possible.

[coltenkrauter]

Sharing a recent use case that relates. I was trying to find a whiteboard sketch from 6–12 months ago. Searched whiteboard graph (I also tried some other keywords) and got thousands of results from the last ~20 years (I’ve got nearly 200k photos/videos in my library). Most results were whiteboards or paper that looked similar. After scrolling through hundreds, I gave up—too much old stuff to sift through.

---

It seems to me that relevance works well when the search is specific. But when the details are fuzzy, having more levers—like sorting by date—can really help narrow the search results.

Not a complaint—just a real-world case where a few extra handles would’ve helped.

Immich is seriously impressive—appreciate all the work going into it.

[mertalev]

That's definitely valid! We'd like to eventually have this feature as well. A tip is that you can apply a date range in the advanced filters along with the search text. You can't sort by date with smart search, but you can filter by it.

[coltenkrauter]

Ah good to know 👍 that is helpful. Ty

[vaxerski]

I agree. Sort and filter, for me, by album. For example, I have two albums: Camera, and Screenshots. I want to find "white cat", and it shows me screenshots I've taken of things, but I want to see only photos from the Camera album.

Right now, I see no option to search only within one album.

[tbeest]

Not being able to filter results by album is also something I greatly miss. Getting downloaded images, screenshots, images sent in group chats, and pictures I've taken with my camera all in the same result is not very useful.

[Skeletron01]

I've also noticed that when filtering by some other type such as person, date range, ect. they are placed in chronological order but there is no way to see what date you are at. I could apply a date filter as well if I was looking for a photo of a person from a specific date range sure, but I am making an album for someone's 21st birthday and looking through all photos of them. This obviously isn't feasible in one sitting so when I leave, I have to try and guess where I was up to. If I could just write down somewhere I was in June 2016 and a way to easily jump to 2016 like in the main timeline would be very useful.

[latteetanne]

Great request, hope this gets implemented in the near feature!
The way I wish it to work is:

• Sort newest to oldest as a default way (with further filtering options available similar to how it is now)
• Show dates grouping similar to the main "Photos" page (or above the image thumbnails if they are grouped by relevance score like it is currently)
• Bonus: ability to jump into all specific date's photos/videos by clicking on the date (check previous for how I would implement it).
  More context: Let's say you find the right group of pictures by searching with the keyword and the photo you are looking specifically is not there but you recognise the event/other images from the same day in the same search. This would make it even more convenient to find what you are looking for.

[RichBrew]

The way this works currently didn't really make much sense to me. An icon with little sliders usually means 'filter' while a magnifying glass means 'search'. in the web app, since i saw a button with sliders, i expected this button to 'filter' the current view. but instead, it does a 'search' and displays in a different format. It seems to me that there is a place for 2 separate but similar functions where one filters the home/timeline view, and a separate one for full search ranked by relevance.

This was my experience as brand new to immich:
I just set this up in docker, and added around 10k photos. As my first task, I want to try to get all or most of them into albums to get them organized. To work on this effectively, i wanted the timeline view to only show me what was not already in an album. But when the results were in the 'search' format, it found it less useful, as it was no longer in any particular order, and no longer grouped by date.

[christiaangoossens]

Wanted to create this feature request myself but it's already there. Especially for general queries the current system on relevance is useless as you need the date context to make sense of it.

Is it an option to implement this as an optional filter that you can select or maybe an app setting. Or maybe, if there are more than 25 matching search results?

[davidfrench0]

Came to feature request this also! Search isn't really usable when a 10 year old photo will show up next to a week old one. Doesn't really make much sense. Trying to search for photos from a specific location and look back through the history, but it doesn't work because I guess it's showing the ones most contextually relevant first?

[celsius6]

Any update here? I find it usefull to seach for cat and get all photos of my cat in chronolgical order. from small kitten to the old nasty tiger he is now. thanks

[bo0tzz]

https://justinmayer.com/posts/any-updates/

[tbleiker]

I came across this discussion and decided to throw in my use cases...

So for me, after starting to tidy up all my photos, I would like to see certain photos, like

1. tagged with "Holiday", "Family", "Mountains" and marked as favourites
2. tagged with "Kitesurfing", showing me and a friend (face recognition) and from the last 3 years
3. my two sons (face recognition) on a waterslide (context)

For the first two, I would like to see all pictures in chronological order and grouped by e.g. day or year. For the last one, relevance is more important to me than chronological order.

Perhaps we should first try to understand what people want to achieve and why, and then let the developers discuss how this can be implemented technically 😄

[johansmolinski]

I made a post buried in a thread somewhere, so let me repost. The context is two example curves of the keywords "beach" and "kite" showing that it's hard to find a general cutoff value. So here is my spontaneous reflection:

To me it looks like you could define the cutoff by an angle of the tangent on the curve, possibly by a configurable value. For instance, for the curves above I think 45 degrees looks fair (about .89 for beach and .91 for kite). Maybe the math is tricky to implement, and maybe it would not apply for all keywords, who knows. Just an idea.