I built a Lightroom Classic plugin that finds photos by description

By David · May 14, 2026 · 8 min read

Every photographer with a Lightroom Classic catalog older than two years has the same secret. There are photos in there you'll never find again. The decisive shot from the trip you took last fall. The frame your spouse keeps asking you to print. The portrait of your grandmother you remember taking but can't surface. You scroll through folders. You sort by date. You try keywords you maybe applied. Nothing.

The reason isn't laziness. Lightroom Classic's search reads what you've written, not what's in the photo. If you didn't tag it "snow", "tree", or "morning light" by hand, you can't search for those things - even though the photo is of snow on a tree in the morning light. The keywording chore-debt piles up forever, and nobody actually tags 50,000 photos.

What Adobe just shipped (and didn't ship to Classic)

Adobe is fixing this for some of its users. In April 2026 they shipped AI search in Lightroom (the cloud-sync version, not Classic) that handles natural-language queries - type "bird with person in photo" and it finds them. Matt Kloskowski, in Fstoppers' April update piece, called it the rare AI feature he actually uses.

But here's the catch: it's not in Lightroom Classic. The cloud Lightroom (formerly Lightroom CC) gets the AI search. Classic users - which is most working photographers - are still stuck typing keywords they never wrote.

What I built

Smart Search closes that gap. It's a Lightroom Classic plugin. Install it like any other plugin. There are three menu items under Library > Plug-in Extras: Index Selected Photos, Search by Description, and Manage Smart Search Index.

The workflow is two phases. First you index a catalog (or a folder, or a single trip) and the plugin builds a small database of what each photo contains. The database is tiny: about 2 KB per photo, so a 50,000-photo catalog uses ~100 MB. From then on, every search runs against that database in seconds.

The first time you index, the plugin downloads about 350 MB of AI files. That's a one-time setup. After that, everything runs on your machine. No internet needed. No photos uploaded. No account.

Search results land as two things you already know how to use:

• A Lightroom keyword under Smart Search > your query
• A collection under Smart Search Results > "your query"

So a search isn't a one-time view. It builds Lightroom metadata you can filter, sort, and export against - and that survives uninstalls.

What works, what doesn't

I want to be honest about this because the alternatives I've tested all over-promise.

Smart Search works well for concrete descriptions:

• "Snow on a tree"
• "Two kids in a fountain"
• "Close-up of a wedding ring"
• "Wide landscape with mountains and a road"
• "Boy laughing"

It works okay for conceptual queries:

• "Joy" - sometimes lands, sometimes pulls portraits with smiles, sometimes pulls golden-hour sunsets
• "Loneliness" - similarly fuzzy
• "Tension" - usually misses

It does not work for specific people by name (Smart Search doesn't know who Alice is - for that I built a separate plugin called Face Tagger that does face recognition; different tool, different problem), and it does not work for exact words you typed in captions, filenames, or IPTC fields (that's what Lightroom's own keyword search is for).

The plugin has a strictness slider in the search dialog. Loose finds more matches but some fit your query only roughly. Strict finds fewer matches but they'll be tighter. Most queries land best at the middle setting; conceptual queries do better at "Loose"; very specific compositional queries do better at "Strict".

How it compares to other Lightroom Classic search plugins

Smart Search isn't alone in this space. Here's the honest landscape:

Excire is the closest comparison. It does more than just search - culling, facial recognition, auto-keywording, video - and costs roughly 10x what Smart Search does. If you want the full suite, it's a good buy.

Peakto Search is mac-only and subscription-based. The base feature set overlaps with Smart Search but the subscription model means the cost compounds.

Smart Search is the lean alternative. It does one thing well, for one-tenth the price. No suite, no upsells, no monthly billing. Pay once, use it forever, switch machines via the deactivate flow.

Why this set of trade-offs

I made some deliberate choices building this. Some might be wrong for you.

For v1, the plugin runs on macOS with Apple Silicon only. Intel Mac and Windows are on the roadmap if there's enough demand. The bundled AI engine needs an arm64 build to avoid making users install Python; packaging a Windows version is real work I'm waiting to commit to until buyers ask. Tell me if you'd want it - demand drives priority.

Everything runs locally. There's no cloud option and there won't be. Every photo stays where it is, every query stays on your Mac, every index entry lives in a file you own and can delete. Slower than a cloud service. Zero privacy compromise.

The price is one-time, not a subscription. I'd rather build something people buy once and remember fondly than something they unsubscribe from in six months. $19.99 is roughly two coffees, and it doesn't change.

v1 is v1. If I ship a major v2 in the future it'll either be a separate purchase or a free upgrade depending on what's involved. I'll be transparent about it either way.

Real examples that work

Three queries from my own catalog (about 18,000 photos, indexed in roughly 45 minutes):

1. "close-up of hands holding something" surfaced 23 photos. About 19 were genuinely what I described (wedding ring close-ups, baby fingers wrapped around an adult thumb, hands holding a glass of wine). The other 4 were near misses (hands on a keyboard, hands in a portrait but mid-frame). Useful at "Balanced" strictness.
2. "snow-covered mountain at sunrise" surfaced 8 photos across three trips. All of them were the shot I was looking for. The plugin understood "sunrise" enough to filter out daytime mountain shots.
3. "two people kissing" surfaced 11 photos. All were correct. Compositionally tight queries with clear subjects are the plugin's strongest case.

A weaker example: "happy moments". That returned 100 photos at the default cap, half of which were genuinely happy (people laughing, kids playing), the rest tangentially related (landscapes I'd consider peaceful, a sunset I called the worst-edited shot in my catalog). Conceptual queries need the strictness slider at "Loose" plus a willingness to scroll.

How to install

Buy Smart Search on LemonSqueezy. You'll get a license key in your email and a thank-you page with the download link.

Unzip the download. You'll get two folders: smart-search.lrplugin and smart-search-server. Put both in the same parent folder. A tidy location on macOS is ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules/.

In Lightroom Classic, go to File > Plug-in Manager, click Add, and select the smart-search.lrplugin folder. Activate your license via Library > Plug-in Extras > Activate License... and paste the key from your email.

First run downloads about 350 MB of AI files (1-3 minutes on a typical connection). After that, indexing and search are both fully offline.

The setup guide walks through three real-world scenarios: a family hobbyist with a decade of untagged catalog, a wedding photographer with 2,000-photo events, and a travel photographer assembling a year-end recap. Plus the full FAQ and troubleshooting.

What I'm not promising

Forecasts are cheap. Here's what's actually committed:

• Bug fixes get shipped fast. The plugin has a contact form built in.
• Refunds: if Smart Search doesn't work on your setup, email me. I'll fix it or refund.
• The plugin will not start uploading your photos in v1.1 to "improve the model". That's not a feature I'd ever ship.
• Windows and Intel Mac support is genuinely TBD. Don't buy v1 expecting they're imminent.