Introducing Filters: search your photo library by colour
I kept running into the same problem. I knew the photo I wanted was mostly green — not that it had a plant in it somewhere, but that green owned the frame — and there was no way to ask for that. Search knows about faces, places, dates and, at a push, the word “dog”. It has nothing at all to say about colour, which is the first thing anyone notices about a picture and the last thing any photo app will let you search on.
So Filters does exactly that. It reads your library once, works out which colours dominate each frame and by how much, how busy the picture is, and what is in it. After that, every query is instant.
What you can ask for
Twenty-four colours: twenty-one hues running from red round to crimson, plus white, grey and black for the frames that have no hue to speak of. Each one comes with a threshold you can move, so Orange ≥ 20% finds a jacket in a crowd and Orange ≥ 60% finds a sunset.
Then there is busyness — Clean, Mid or Busy — which is the difference between an empty sky and a wall of foliage. Six subjects recognised on-device. Favourites you have already starred. Date ranges. Any three of those combine into one query, drawn as three overlapping circles with the live match count sitting in the middle, so you can watch a search tighten as you drag a threshold rather than running it blind.
If a query comes back with nothing — and stacking three tight filters, it will — you get suggestions that already have results behind them. Lower the threshold to 45%. Try rose instead of crimson. Widen the dates.
Where the photos go
Nowhere. All the analysis runs on your device, using Apple’s frameworks, and the index it produces is a local cache. There is no account, no upload, and no analytics on what is in your library. Delete the app and the index goes with it. For a product whose whole job is to look at every photo you own, that seemed like the only defensible way to build it.
What it costs
Free covers the last twelve months of your library, with every filter in it — not a trial, not a crippled tier. Pro opens the same tools across everything you have ever shot: $19.99 once, or $9.99 a year.
Filters is finishing up for iPhone and iPad, with a Mac version to follow. If colour is how you think about your photographs, I think you will find it hard to go back.
