How do I fix multi-line caption search in Photos on iOS 18?

It's always fun to find someone to blame, but it's also good to try to understand why it's not working for you while it is for others. Frankly, fast efficient accurate searching is hard to design.

Have you tried a forced restart? 

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

This is different from a simple Power Off. I had to continue holding the button down past the "slide to power off" message, and then I released the button only after  the Apple Logo appeared indicating a re-start. 

The nature of caption searches seems to change-- I don't think there is any official documentation on it. At one point the search seemed to be limited to the first 200 characters. Then the only searches that worked had to include the beginning of a caption. That's history.

I just tried a search for "largest living rodent," a phrase within (but not beginning) a caption for a picture of a capybara at the zoo, and it returned the right picture as the only result. It worked on my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad. This is iOS 18.5 and iPadOS 18.4.1.

Your example inspired me to try to look up my own photo of a capybara, I have seen Costa Rica, Richard. But the search turned up only false positives: A photo of a brown bear, two video clips showing monkeys, a sea lion and my nephew, only items based on wrong categories, no text results at all. This is funny, but another very useful:

Do you have any idea, how to specify in our search query that we want to search the titles, not the categories?

If there are many search results, I get a list of results grouped by the kind of result, but not, if there are only a few items:

I'd rather see them in Cost Rica, but the Dallas Zoo just got three new capybaras. My captions for the seven pictures on my Mac all say:

2025 03 06 Dallas Zoo

The capybara or greater capybara is the largest living rodent, native to South America

which I imagine I copied from Wikipedia. They also show a visual lookup button in the menu, but the icon on each image itself seems to come and go.

If I search for "capybara" I get them all. Since I was looking for interior phrases, I searched for "largest living rodent" instead of "capybara." (Also, I don't really know how to spell "capybara.") That also returns all 7 on my Mac.

In the post, I was referring to my iPad which uses my "Favorites" Library, so there is only one of them.

If I search for "elephant" I get

a giant robot walking through the streets of London. You just don't see this kind of thing in Dallas.

There are many mysteries.

jo_d12 wrote: … it should be searching the actual photo, captions, title, etc.

as it does for me.

léonie was actually asking about how the search could be restricted, rather than searching for everything everywhere all at once. In my case, Elephant was not in the caption, but the title was "2006 05 06 - 055 - Time Travelling Elephant." Titles are used on Macs, but they don't show in iOS-- yet they respond to searches in iOS and in iPadOS.

For searching, Photos has to scan all the pictures and add all this information to its database, and that takes time. You may just need to wait awhile.

jo_d12 wrote: So how does one get Apple to address this issue?

Does Apple have an issue? Searching works for léonie and for me. How long has it been since you updated your iPhone? You haven't told us what version of iOS you're using…