Search a gallery

A four-hundred-frame gallery is only as useful as your ability to find one photograph in it. Encore describes each frame once, when it is uploaded, so it can be found afterwards by what is actually in the picture.

Turning it on

There is a Make this gallery searchable checkbox on the new-gallery form, ticked by default, and a Search toggle in the gallery's settings panel afterwards. It is one switch controlling three things:

• whether new uploads get described at all
• whether visitors see a search field on the gallery
• whether it costs you anything

The visitor's field also needs something to be worth searching: it appears on galleries of 12 frames or more. Below that a client just scrolls, and a search box would be furniture.

Off means off. No description happens, nothing is sent to the browser, and there is no field. Leave it off for work nobody will ever search - a personal archive, a one-off, a set you are only storing.

What you can search by

• The roll ID, always, on every gallery. Type 0042 or just 42.
• What is in the frame - subjects, objects, setting, light, the moment. "cake", "golden hour", "first dance", "touchdown".
• The section label, if you have divided the gallery into sections. Naming a section is the one part *you* write, so it is how anything the model cannot know - a player's name, a family's name, a set list - becomes searchable.

Words are combined, not alternated: "red jersey" finds frames that are both, in any order.

Sports galleries read numbers

The description is tuned to the gallery's event type, so a sports gallery is described differently from a wedding. On a gallery typed Sports or Motorsport, Encore reads the numbers and names printed on uniforms, bibs and bodywork, and a parent can type 23 and get their own child's frames.

Set the event type when you create the gallery. It is not decoration - it decides both what the description looks for and how much of the image is examined.

Numbers are read where they are legible. A number turned away from the camera, blurred by motion, or hidden behind another player is left out rather than guessed at, because a wrong number hands somebody another family's photographs.

What it will not do

It describes scenes and reads printed text. It does not recognise faces, and it will never tell you that two photographs show the same person. On a wedding gallery it will not transcribe names even where they are printed on the stationery - a guest at a wedding did not choose to be findable by name.

Cost

Describing a frame costs a fraction of a cent, once, at upload. It is the only thing in Encore that is priced by how many photographs you have rather than by what plan you are on, which is why the switch exists and why it is per gallery.

Content search is a Professional and Studio Plus feature.