Type what you're looking for

1. Press ⌘F to focus the search box. If you’ve typed something there before, it will be selected. When it’s empty, you’ll see What are you looking for?
2. Type a description of the image, conversation, or shoot detail you’re looking for. For example, beach walk, product detail, or night shoot.
3. When you stop typing, the ⏎ symbol appears after a short pause. Its tooltip says: “Add what you typed as one search”.
4. Press Enter. Your phrase becomes a search chip and the box clears. You’ll see this chip in the view row above your clips.
5. Browse the results. Select a video you want to inspect and open it with Space.

If you press Enter while the search box is empty, focus leaves the text field. This lets you use culling shortcuts like R and F right away.

Search isn’t limited to images. You can also find file details and names you’ve given clips. For example, if you named a video Night walk, you can find it again by typing that name.

To search images, conversations, and text inside videos, Sense must be on and the relevant analyses must be complete. If analysis is still running on newly added videos, some results may not appear yet.

• If analysis is still running when you focus the search box, you’ll see progress on the right, such as Speech 120/340 · ….
• If Sense is still analyzing, clicking the search box or pressing ⌘F opens a small note below it: “Sense is still looking at your videos.” with progress on the right (for example, “3 / 105”). Below it: “Until it’s done, search works on file names, notes, tags, and dates; speech, text, and image search will come later.” This note doesn’t stop you from searching. Close it with Esc, by clicking outside it, or with ✕. If you select Don’t show again, it won’t open again.
• You can also follow the preparation status in the Machine section above.

Your phrase doesn’t have to match speech; text visible in an image or video can also create a match. To understand why a result appeared, open the video and read Why it matched.

Sense examines text inside a video in two stages. First, it checks one frame per second to find moments where text appears. Then it reads the text it found in detail. If text stays on screen for a long time, Sense checks it again every ten seconds. A search result from text takes you to the moment where it appears. Small text that appears very briefly may sometimes be missed.

For image search, Sense checks the video once per second; for videos longer than half an hour, it checks every two seconds. It finds scene changes and saves the clearest frame from each scene. For long scenes, it picks a new frame every ten seconds; it keeps up to 240 frames per clip. This lets you search for a scene that appears for just a few seconds and go to that moment when you select the result. After an update, Sense may recheck your older videos in the background. You can keep using your previous search results while this runs.