Everything you need, in plain English. No tech-speak.
Smart Search lets you find any photo in your catalog by typing what's in it. Type "sunset over water", "two kids in a fountain", or "close-up of a wedding ring", and Smart Search surfaces the matching photos - even if you never tagged them by hand.
It works in two phases. First you index your photos (the plugin looks at each one and remembers what's in it). After that, you search by typing - and matches come back in seconds.
smart-search.lrplugin and smart-search-server - need to sit in the same parent folder. This is critical. The plugin looks for the server next to itself. If you separate them, nothing will work.smart-search.lrplugin and smart-search-server.~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules/. Just make sure the two folders end up next to each other.smart-search.lrplugin folder. Lightroom should show "Smart Search" as enabled.The very first time you use any Smart Search feature, the plugin has to download its AI files to your Mac. This is a one-time thing.
After that one-time setup, Smart Search runs entirely on your computer. No internet needed for any feature. Your photos and search history never leave your Mac.
Before Smart Search will work, you need to enter your license key. You should have one in your purchase-receipt email from LemonSqueezy.
Your license activates on one computer at a time. Moving to a new machine? Run Library > Plug-in Extras > Deactivate License on the old one first to free the slot.
If you only read one section of this guide, read this one. Follow it end-to-end and you'll do your first real search.
Don't try to index your whole 50,000-photo catalog on the first run. Pick a folder or collection with 100 to 1,000 photos - one trip, one event, one month. You'll see the plugin work end-to-end in 10 minutes instead of overnight.
When the search finishes, the plugin opens a results collection automatically. You'll see a new collection set called Smart Search Results in your Collections panel (left sidebar of the Library module). Inside, there's a collection named after your search query - for example, "sunset over water" (23 matches).
You'll also see a new keyword tag under Smart Search > sunset over water in the Keyword List, applied to every matching photo. From now on, you can search by that keyword like any other Lightroom keyword.
That's it. You just searched your catalog by description for the first time. Repeat with different queries any time - each search builds its own collection and keyword without overwriting the last one.
Smart Search has three phases. You'll do the first one occasionally, the second one constantly, and the third one is just Lightroom doing what it already does.
Index → Search → Browse
Indexing is the step where Smart Search looks at each photo and remembers what's in it. Until a photo is indexed, it's invisible to search. Once it's indexed, every search goes through it.
When to index:
Indexing is resumable. You don't have to do it all at once. Index a folder today, another tomorrow, and keep going. Already-indexed photos are skipped automatically.
Search is the main thing you'll do. Type a description, get matching photos.
What you can type:
What works less well:
Searching within a selection. If you have photos selected when you open the search dialog, an option appears to search only within those photos. Useful when you're working in a specific folder or event and want to narrow the search down.
After a search, Smart Search hands you back two things you already know how to use:
From there it's regular Lightroom. Filter, sort, rate, edit, export. The collection and the keyword behave like any other - drag photos in or out, build a Smart Collection on top, export the lot. Smart Search' job is done once it hands the matches over.
All Smart Search features live under Library > Plug-in Extras in Lightroom. Here's each one, in menu order.
What it does: looks at each selected photo and remembers what's in it, so future searches can find it.
When to use it: the first time you use the plugin, and any time you add new photos to your catalog.
What happens: a dialog appears asking whether to skip already-indexed photos (leave this on - it makes re-runs much faster). After you click Prepare, a progress bar shows the indexing run. When it finishes, a summary tells you how many were newly indexed, skipped, or had errors.
Limits: nothing hard - you can index hundreds of thousands of photos. Speed is roughly 1-2 photos per second on Apple Silicon. Index in batches you can walk away from.
What it does: finds photos in your indexed catalog that match a plain-English description you type.
When to use it: any time you want to find specific photos. This is the main feature.
What happens: a dialog appears with a few controls:
Click Find. After a few seconds, the results collection opens and you're looking at your matches.
What it does: opens a dialog showing your index stats and lets you remove photos from the index.
When to use it: to check how many photos are indexed, to remove specific photos that you no longer want searchable, or to clear the whole index if you want to start fresh.
What happens: the dialog shows the total indexed photo count. You'll see two action buttons:
Good to know: "Clear Entire Index" is a one-click full reset. Use it if you want to re-index everything with updated photos, or just to start over.
What it does: unlocks the plugin using the license key from your purchase email.
When to use it: once, after you install. Until you activate, every Smart Search feature shows a "please activate" prompt.
What happens: paste the license key into the dialog and click Activate. The plugin confirms with "License activated." and you're done. Don't have a key yet? The dialog has a Purchase a License button that opens the checkout page in your browser.
Your license activates on a limited number of computers at a time. Moving to a new machine? Run Deactivate License on the old one first to free the slot.
What it does: removes the license from this computer, freeing the activation so you can use it on another machine.
When to use it: before moving the plugin to a new computer.
What happens: a confirm dialog appears. Click Deactivate. The license is cleared from this Mac. Next time you run a Smart Search feature, you'll be asked to activate again.
Three readers, three very different starting points. If your situation looks like one of these, copy the rhythm.
You've got a decade of family photos sitting in Lightroom. Holidays, road trips, kids growing up, birthdays mixed in with everything else. You can never find that one shot - the rainy day at the lake, the close-up of grandma's hands, the candle-lit dinner. Manually keywording 30,000 photos is a non-starter.
How to approach it: don't index all 30,000 in one go. Pick the most recent year of photos (a few thousand) and run Index Selected Photos on that. Walk away for an hour. After dinner, try a few searches - "kids playing in the snow", "birthday cake with candles", "us at the beach". See how the plugin does on photos you remember well. That builds your intuition for how to phrase queries. Then index the next year, and the next. After a few weekends, your whole catalog is searchable. Make a habit of running Index Selected Photos on any new import.
What to expect: the first searches feel magical - photos you'd forgotten surface immediately. Some queries take a couple of rephrases to land. Conceptual stuff like "joy" works only loosely; concrete stuff like "child blowing out candles" works great.
You shoot weddings and your clients want to skim through their gallery for "the detail shots", "the cake", "the kiss", "guests dancing". You don't want to keyword 2,000 photos by hand for every wedding.
How to approach it: import the full wedding into Lightroom as usual, cull down to your delivered set. Select the delivered photos and run Index Selected Photos. On 2,000 photos this is roughly 20-30 minutes - run it while you start editing in Develop. Once it's done, the gallery is searchable by description. You can deliver the keywords (the "Smart Search > close-up of a wedding ring" keyword is real Lightroom metadata; it travels with the file on export). Or you can keep them as a personal search tool for when the client emails asking for "all the shots of grandma".
What to expect: the keyword and collection structure makes finding specific shots far faster than scrolling. Combine this with Face Tagger for the bridal party and you've got both "all the bride's mother" (Face Tagger) and "all the cake-cutting shots" (Smart Search) one search away.
You travelled hard this year. Tokyo in spring, Iceland in summer, Mexico in autumn. 15,000 photos sitting in Lightroom. Now you want to build a year-end blog post or a print portfolio organized around themes - "food markets", "mountain landscapes", "people in transit". Folder organization by trip doesn't help; you need to slice across all trips.
How to approach it: at the end of each trip, run Index Selected Photos on that trip's folder. By year-end your whole travel catalog is already indexed. When it's time to assemble the year-end piece, run Search by Description with the themes you want to feature - "street food vendor", "snow-covered mountain", "person waiting at a train station". Each search builds its own collection under Smart Search Results, so you can browse them side-by-side. Drag favourites into your portfolio collection, export the final set.
What to expect: the search-builds-a-collection pattern is perfect for this. You'll do 10-20 searches across the year-end project, each one giving you a curated mini-set to pick from. The strictness slider matters here - for "mountain landscape" go strict (you want the heroes), for "street food" go loose (you want the broader set to choose from).
The first time Smart Search runs, it downloads about 350 MB of AI files to your Mac. This takes 1-3 minutes on a typical connection, and there's no progress bar - Lightroom may look frozen. It's a one-time thing. After that, everything runs locally and fast.
Yes - fully, after the one-time first-run download. All indexing and search happens on your computer. No internet is needed after setup. The only exception is license activation, which calls home to verify your key.
Yes. Smart Search reads .ARW (Sony), .CR2/.CR3 (Canon), .NEF (Nikon), .RAF (Fuji), .DNG, and most other common RAW formats directly. No JPEG export needed.
Not yet. The v1 installer is Mac-only. Windows support is on the roadmap if there's enough demand - let us know you'd want it and we'll prioritise accordingly.
About 1-2 seconds per photo on Apple Silicon. A 10,000-photo catalog typically indexes in 20-40 minutes. You can index in batches across days - already-indexed photos are skipped on each run, so it's safe to re-run anytime.
No. Only photos you've indexed are searchable. If you're not interested in some folders (old archived work, scans, screenshots), don't index them and they stay out of search results.
No - closing Lightroom aborts the run. But your progress is safe. Photos that finished indexing are saved. When you come back, just run Index Selected Photos again on the same batch; the plugin will skip the ones already done and continue.
Smart adjustments (exposure, contrast, small color tweaks) won't throw off the index. Major changes - full black-and-white conversion, heavy color shifts, aggressive crops - might mean the index no longer reflects the photo's current look. Re-index those specifically by selecting them and running Index Selected Photos. Already-indexed photos are skipped by default; turn off the "Skip already-indexed" checkbox to re-process them.
About 2 KB per photo. 10,000 photos = 20 MB. 100,000 photos = 200 MB. The database lives in a file next to the plugin folder.
Concrete descriptions of what's in the photo - objects, scenes, people doing things, compositional elements. "Red car at night", "child blowing out candles", "wide landscape with mountains". Abstract concepts ("joy", "freedom") sometimes work but are hit-or-miss.
No. Smart Search doesn't know who anyone is - it only knows what things are. For searching by person, install Face Tagger too. The two plugins complement each other and use the same brand.
A few things to check. First, have you indexed the photos you're searching? Only indexed photos are searchable. Second, the strictness slider - try sliding toward "Loose" if you're getting nothing. Third, try rephrasing - "person riding a bike" and "cyclist" can return different sets.
A few possibilities. The photos might not be indexed (run Index Selected Photos on them). The strictness slider might be too tight - try Loose. The query might be too specific - "wide-angle close-up of a small red flower in moss" is harder than "red flower in moss". And if the photo's been heavily edited in Develop since indexing, the index might be out of date - re-index those photos.
Yes - select them first in Lightroom (use a folder, a date range, a Smart Collection, etc.), then run Search by Description. A checkbox in the dialog lets you restrict the search to just the selected photos.
Indirectly, yes. Every search creates a Lightroom keyword under "Smart Search > your query". Searching that keyword in Lightroom's normal filter shows the same matches - no need to re-run the AI search. You can also turn searches into Smart Collections by filtering on the keyword.
One collection per search you've run, named after the query (truncated to 40 characters). Each collection contains the matching photos in similarity order - the closest matches first. You can rename, delete, or reorganize these collections like any other Lightroom collection.
Yes. Right-click the results collection in Lightroom and choose Delete. The collection goes away; the photos and their other keywords stay. If you also want the "Smart Search > your query" keyword gone, remove it from the Keyword List panel.
The previous "Smart Search Results" collection set is replaced. The keyword tag stays. So running "sunset" twice doesn't accumulate two collections - you always see just the latest run's results.
No. All indexing and search happens locally on your Mac. Your photos, search queries, and the index database never leave your machine. The only network call Smart Search makes is to validate your license key. See the Privacy Policy for the full legal language.
In a file called smart_search.db next to the plugin folder. Delete it (or uninstall the plugin) to remove everything Smart Search has remembered.
One license activates on a limited number of machines at a time. If you need another slot, deactivate one of the existing ones first - or use the contact form if you've lost access to an old machine and can't deactivate it.
Check your purchase-receipt email from LemonSqueezy - the key is right there. If you can't find it, reply to the receipt for a resend, or use our contact form and we'll look it up.
The contact form on the home page reaches me directly. Solo developer, personal responses.
If the plugin doesn't work on your setup, contact us - we'll either fix the issue or refund you in full. Full terms on the Terms of Service page.
The plugin couldn't reach its helper. First try: quit Lightroom (⌘Q) and reopen it - the helper starts automatically when you run any Smart Search feature.
If it persists: open Finder and check that the smart-search-server folder is sitting right next to smart-search.lrplugin in the same parent folder. If it's not, move it there.
This is macOS being cautious on the very first run. Open the smart-search-server folder in Finder. Right-click the smart-search-server file inside and choose Open. Click Open again when macOS asks. You only need to do this once.
That's the one-time AI download. Give it 1-3 minutes on first run. It only happens once. If you're still stuck after 10 minutes, check your internet connection, then restart Lightroom.
The AI matches loosely by default. Slide the strictness slider toward "Strict" and re-run. You'll get fewer but more accurate matches.
You haven't activated yet, or the activation isn't recognised. Open Library > Plug-in Extras > Activate License... and paste the key from your purchase email. If the dialog says "already activated" but the plugin still asks, use Deactivate License first, then activate again.
The photo's source file isn't on disk - maybe the external drive is unplugged, or the file was moved. Smart Search needs the original to read what's in it (smart previews don't have enough detail). Reconnect the drive or locate the original, then re-run the index step on those photos.
Use the feedback form to send a quick note. Include: what you were trying to do, what happened, what you expected. Solo developer, personal responses, usually same-day.
Still stuck after troubleshooting? Tell us what's going wrong - I read every message and usually respond within a day.
If you also work with people-heavy catalogs, check out Face Tagger - it tags people by name from your own training photos. The two plugins are designed to complement each other: Face Tagger for who's in the photo, Smart Search for what's in it.