Support

In-app guide

The same guide you open in PhotoCore 1.10 with ⌘? (Help menu), here as well so you can read it from any device: how semantic search works, how to phrase a search, what the similarity threshold means, scope and filters, indexing, Picks, isolation and compare, keyboard shortcuts and privacy.

Contents: How search works Writing a good search Threshold and results Scope and filters Indexing Picks, isolation, compare Keyboard shortcuts Archive and export Privacy

How search works

PhotoCore doesn't look for words in file names: it looks at the photos. When it indexes a folder, it computes a numeric fingerprint for every image that describes what is in it: subjects, scene, colours, mood. When you type a search, it computes the same kind of fingerprint for your phrase and shows the photos whose fingerprint is closest.

That's why "a cat in a tree" finds the right photo even when the file is called IMG_4021.HEIC.

Everything stays on your Mac

The model that computes the fingerprints ships inside the app and runs on your Mac. Your photos are never uploaded anywhere, and neither is the text you search for. It works offline.

Semantic search vs. AI phrase analysis

They are two different things:

• Semantic search (what runs when you press Return) compares your phrase with the photos. It is always local.
• AI phrase analysis (the ✦ button in Easy mode, or ⌘⇧A) asks a language model to extract filters from the phrase. For example, "mountain photos taken in July with the iPhone" becomes a semantic search for "mountain" plus a date and a camera filter. It uses the local AI engine if you downloaded it, or the remote endpoint you configured in Settings → LLM Model.

What it finds, and what it doesn't

The model is very good at subjects, scenes, objects, actions and expressions. It is weaker at text written inside photos, proper names and abstract concepts. For people there is a dedicated feature, face recognition, which you can turn on in Settings → General.

Writing a good search

The most important rule: describe the photo the way you would tell someone about it. The more detail you give, the more precise the search.

• "dog" finds every photo with a dog, and many where the dog is a detail.
• "a black dog running on the beach" finds that photo.

What works well

• Subject + context: "a cat in a tree", "a red bicycle against a wall".
• Scenes and places: "sunset over the sea", "a street at night in the rain", "snow-capped mountains".
• Expressions and emotions: "sad faces", "a laughing child", "people dancing".
• Composite descriptions: "the house with the red door", "a table set for dinner".
• Style and mood: "black and white photo", "warm sunset light", "blurry, shaky photo".

What works less well

• Single, generic words ("photo", "nice", "holiday"): too vague to steer the search.
• Proper names of people and places: the model doesn't know who Mark is or where Piazza Navona is. For people use face recognition; for places use the Location filter or the Map.
• Text written inside the photo: a sign, a shop front, a document. The model sees it as a shape; it doesn't read it.
• Negations: "without people" does not exclude people. Search for what you want to see instead: "empty landscape".

Suggestions under the search field

When the field is empty, your recent searches and a few examples to try appear underneath. Click one to see what happens: it's the fastest way to learn how to phrase things. Recent searches stay on your Mac only, and you can clear them at any time. If you prefer an empty field, Hide suggestions at the bottom of the panel turns them off; Settings > General > Show search suggestions brings them back. Recents and examples stay reachable from the bookmark button at the right of the field.

Saved searches

A saved search keeps the criteria, not the results: text, filters, sources, Picks and ranking. Every time you open it, the search runs again on the photos you have at that moment, so new matches show up on their own.

• Save: the bookmark button at the right of the field, or Search > Save Current Search. ⌘F takes you to the field. A name is suggested from the text or the filters; you can change it.
• Run: pick it from the bookmark menu or from Search > Saved Searches. A chip with its name appears in the filter row.
• Change: edit the text or a filter and the chip shows Modified; from its menu, Update saved search, Save as new or Revert changes. Nothing is saved on its own.
• Sources: if a folder of the search is on a drive that is not connected, you can run it on the available sources without changing the saved one. If a folder was removed, PhotoCore tells you before doing anything.
• Manage: rename, duplicate, delete from Search > Manage Saved Searches. A search deleted by mistake comes back with ⌘Z.

A search by image cannot be saved yet, and you leave the isolated selection before saving.

In Pro mode

• Type @ followed by a name to restrict the search to photos where that person appears.
• One phrase, a comma, another phrase, like "dawn, dusk", opens the Semantic Bridge: the visual path between two ideas.
• Three or more comma-separated phrases start a Constellation with those pillars.

Threshold and results

Settings → Search has two controls. They do different things, and knowing which is which avoids the most common confusion.

Similarity threshold

How close a photo must be to the best result to be shown. It's not an absolute value: PhotoCore takes the photo that best matches your phrase and shows every photo that comes close enough to it.

• Broad: more photos get in, including loosely related ones. Useful when you're after something rare and don't want to miss anything.
• Balanced (the default): the right compromise for most searches.
• Precise: only photos very close to the best one remain. Useful when the search is specific and you want a few, on-point results.

Next to the label you also see the number, for fine tuning. It applies to your next search: results already on screen don't change.

Maximum number of results

The largest number of photos a single search can return, from 10 to 200.

When to touch them

Most of the time the defaults are fine. Two situations where it pays to adjust:

• The search returns too many loosely related photos → raise the threshold.
• You know there are more photos than shown and want all of them → raise the ceiling, or make the phrase more specific.

Scope and filters

Easy and Pro

The switch at the top right changes how you work:

• Easy: a search bar and nothing else. The ✦ button asks the AI to extract filters from your phrase.
• Pro: the filter bar appears under the search field, and the search scope in the folder menu. From version 1.9 this is the starting mode.

Search scope (Pro)

Click the folder name at the top left. In the Global search scope section, choose where to search:

• Current folder: only the open folder.
• All connected folders: everything you've indexed that is reachable right now.
• Entire indexed history: including photos on drives and NAS that are currently disconnected. You'll see them with an offline mark and can reconnect the volume from the photo itself.

The filter bar (Pro)

Filters combine with each other and with the search: each filter narrows what you see. Only the filters that make sense for the photos in front of you appear: if the folder contains only iPhone photos, you won't see a list of cameras.

• Picks: only the photos you've starred. Appears when at least one is in view.
• File type, Camera, Focal, ISO, Aperture, Aspect: the technical data of the shot.
• Date: a calendar range, over the folder's actual values.
• Quality: the score PhotoCore computes from sharpness, exposure and faces. With the filter on, photos are sorted by quality.
• Location: the city, derived from GPS coordinates without a connection.
• People in photo and Person: how many people there are, and who, with face recognition on.

Remove all filters, in the results header, clears everything at once, Picks included.

AI-extracted filters (Easy)

In Easy, after an AI analysis, the extracted filters appear as chips under the bar. The ✕ on a chip removes it and refreshes the results.

Indexing

Before you can search, PhotoCore has to look at the photos: that's indexing. It happens when you open a folder for the first time, and for every photo it computes the search fingerprint, the thumbnail, the technical data, the quality score and, if enabled, the faces.

What to expect

• Progress is shown in the pill at the top and in the status bar: how many photos are ready out of the total.
• The app must stay open. If you quit, it picks up where it left off next time.
• You can already search while indexing runs: results come from the photos that are ready.
• The first pass on a large folder takes time, in proportion to the number of photos and the disk speed. On later passes PhotoCore only checks what changed.

What gets excluded

In Settings → Search you can ask to keep screenshots, scanned documents and bursts of near-identical shots out of the index. Excluded photos don't disappear from disk: you can review them from the folder menu (Excluded from this source) and bring them back.

You can also exclude photos by hand: select them and use Exclude in the action bar. These can be recovered from the same menu.

Re-indexing

If you moved or edited many photos, or changed the exclusion rules, open the folder menu and choose Re-index current folder. Exclusion rules apply to the next indexing passes, not to the ones already done.

Drives and NAS

PhotoCore remembers photos even when the drive is disconnected. In the Entire indexed history scope you still see them, with an offline mark. From Settings → Search → Manage roots and saved paths you can drop drives you won't use again from the index.

Picks, isolation, compare

Three tools for the moment when you've found what you were looking for and want to choose the good shots.

Picks

The star. Mark a photo you want to keep an eye on.

• In the gallery: select and press P (or .). With several photos selected it marks them all; if they're all Picks already, it unmarks them.
• In Quick Look (space bar): the star button.
• In Compare: keys 1 2 3 4.
• From the context menu, on a photo or on the selection.

Picks survive a restart. In Pro mode, the Picks chip appears in the filter bar with the number in view: click it to see only those. Your star takes precedence over the automatic Best Shot star: in a group of similar shots you see one star only.

Isolating the selection

You have a search with forty results and want to work on twelve. Select them and press ⌘↩: the gallery shows only those, and the Isolated selection bar appears at the top.

• Inside the isolation everything works as usual: filters, Picks, Compare, Quick Look.
• Select a subset and press ⌘↩ again to narrow the set further.
• Mark all as Picks, in the bar, saves the result of your work in one go.
• To exit: ⌘↩ with nothing selected, Esc (the first deselects, the second exits) or the Exit button.

The isolation ends on its own when you change folder or run a new search: it belonged to that result.

Compare

Select two to four photos and press Compare: they open side by side, large, with synced zoom and pan. Double-click to switch between fit and actual size. Each pane shows the quality score; keys 1–4 mark the Pick.

The full loop

Search → isolate the candidates with ⌘↩ → compare in groups of four → mark with 1–4 or P → turn on the Picks filter → export or share.

Why this Best Shot?

In a group of similar shots, the outlined star marks the photo PhotoCore recommends. Click it: a popover says in one or two lines why, using only what was measured, such as sharper subject detail, less highlight clipping, better captured faces or a higher visual score. Show details lists the measures behind it. When the top two are too close, the popover says so and offers Compare; View group isolates the similar shots in the gallery. The same explanation is in the context menu, Why this Best Shot?, also when one of your Picks covers the star. The scores are the ones from 1.9; the choice stays yours.

Keyboard shortcuts

Search

Gallery

Quick Look

Compare

App

Archive and export

Archive Apple Photos copies your library, originals and current edits, into folders by year and month on a disk you choose. Every file is written, read back and checked against its fingerprint; later runs copy only what is new, and deleting in Photos never deletes from the archive. The archive is a PhotoCore source like any other, searchable even with the drive unplugged.

Export albums as folders

From the archive's source menu, or from the summary at the end of an archive run, Export albums as folders writes the albums as plain folders on a disk you choose.

• One folder per album; the folders you created in Photos become subfolders; a photo in two albums lands in both. All albums, or only the ones you pick.
• Versions: originals and current edits in separate subfolders, originals only, or the current appearance of each photo.
• Include photos outside albums puts them in Unfiled, only when you export all albums.
• Number files in album order keeps the order you gave them in Photos, as a prefix in the file name. It needs an archive updated with 1.10 or later; otherwise the sheet offers to update it.
• Use photo dates in Finder sets the file dates of the copies to the photo dates. The content of the files does not change.

Each export creates a new folder, PhotoCore Albums with the date, and never writes into an existing folder of yours. Every copy is verified the same way as the archive; on the same APFS disk the copy is instant and takes no extra space. If you unplug the disk or quit, the export pauses and resumes from the source menu. At the end you get PhotoCore Export Report.html, readable in any browser, and PhotoCore Export Manifest.json with every file, its fingerprint and its outcome. The exported folder is not added to your sources on its own.

Neither the archive nor the export ever changes anything in Apple Photos. The export needs enough free space for the files it will write, and it will not write inside the archive itself or inside a Photos library.

Privacy

PhotoCore's rule is simple: your photos stay yours, on your Mac. Here is, point by point, what stays on the device and what can leave it.

Always stays on your Mac

• The photos. They are never uploaded, not for search nor for anything else.
• Semantic search. The model ships inside the app and runs locally. The text you search for stays here too.
• The index, thumbnails, quality scores. They are PhotoCore files on your disk. You can delete them in Settings → Search.
• Picks, exclusions, recent searches. Only here. Recent searches can be cleared from the panel under the search field.
• Face data. If you turn on recognition, the face fingerprints and the people you name stay on your Mac. From Settings → General you can delete all biometric data in one go.

Can leave, only if you choose so

• AI phrase analysis with a remote endpoint. If you configure an external service in Settings → LLM Model, the text of your search phrase (not the photos) is sent to that service when you use ✦ or ⌘⇧A. With the local AI engine, nothing leaves.
• AI rename. To suggest a descriptive name, a downscaled version of the photo is shown to the language model: local, or the remote endpoint if that's what you chose.
• Support requests. From Settings → Support you can email us your Mac configuration, the app version and the technical log. You see everything before sending, and you are the one pressing Send in your mail client.

No tracking

PhotoCore has no analytics, no ads and builds no profile of you. The technical log exists to diagnose problems. It may contain file names and search phrases: that's why you see it in full, as a preview, before deciding whether to send it.

Your original files

PhotoCore never modifies your photos. Renaming changes the file name, not the content. Excluding a photo removes it from the index, not from the disk.