The Search Bar – Advanced

Understanding Search expressions

When you enter a word into the Mylio Search bar it is considered an expression. A Mylio search expression can be formed in a few different ways:

1. ( expression ) – parentheses are used for grouping combinations of expressions
2. expression expression – Two expressions specified after one another implies an AND
3. expression AND expression  –  can also be input as: && and &
4. expression OR expression   – can also be input as: || and |
5. expression IN expression   
6. NOT expression –  can also be input as: –
7. term-or-value

AND, OR, IN, and NOT expressions are explained in our Search bar introduction article. 

The order that you place expressions matters the precedence they are interpreted by is the 1 to 7 order as specified above. 

Term-or-value expressions explained

A term-or-value expression allows you to narrow your search to a specific type. “Term” refers to the type of item you’re looking for, while “Value” refers to the specific name of the item you want to be returned.

Example 1:

album:Animals

In this example, “album” is the term and “Animals” is the value, so Mylio would display albums with the name “Animals”.

Example 2:

-make:Canon

In this example, “NOT make” is the term (- is short for NOT as noted above) and “Canon” is the value, Mylio will return all photos in the library that are not taken by a Canon camera.

Special punctuation can be used to even further customize your searches. Mylio allows for 5 types of quotes in strings:

1. ” 
2. “ 
3. ” 
4. ‟ 
5. „

Single-word strings do not need quotes but if a string is more than one word it does need a quote. Let’s say we have a caption on a photo that is:

The “quick” brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Here are some string searches that can be performed for the captioned image:

1. caption:fox Will search the whole word “fox”. It will not match foxtrot, outfox, or outfoxed.
2. caption:=’The “quick” brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ Will search the entire caption exactly including case capitalization. Using single quotes around this string allows for the double quotes in the caption to be included.
3. caption:”The quick*” Adding the * at the end of the string searches captions that start with “The quick”. 
4. caption:”*lazy dog” Adding the * at the start of the string searches captions that end with lazy dog.
5. caption:*row* Adding ** around a word will search the letters r,o, and w in that order. This would include partial spellings, so the word “brown” would be included.
6. caption:*ju?ps* Matches captions that contain a word that starts with ju and any single letter followed by ps. So jumps is a possible search result.

The following terms are available, and their preferred data type is listed.

• Booleans can be entered as True/False/On/Off etc.
• Dates can be entered as DD/MM/YYYY
• The plural is also allowed for all the terms below (albums instead of album/person instead of people etc.)