PhotoMesa lets you search for photos using the Find tab in six ways: with keywords; by the folder a photo is in; by the people in a photo; by the categories a photo was annotated with; and by the year or month a photo was taken.
Entering any text in the find box and pressing "Go" will display any photos that has that text in the image's filename, in the names of any of the folders containing that photo, or in any of the people or category annotations.
If some photos are already selected by folder, people, category, year, or month - then searching by keyword will restrict the search further - showing only those photos with that keyword in the original set of photos. If, on the other hand, no photos are selected when a keyword is searched for, then all photos from the entire library that have that keyword will be shown.
Searching for photos based on what folder they are in was discussed in the section on Browsing Photos.
Once you have annotated some photos with the people that are in them, you can search for photos based on who is in them. Check the box in front of any name, and only the photos containing all the people that are checked will be displayed.
The right-most column in the listing of people shows how many photos there are with each person. When one or more people are checked, then the numbers by all the other photos decrease to show the number of photos of each person with the checked people.
The columns can be sorted (in alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical order) by clicking once or twice on any column header.
Once you have annotated some photos with categories, you can search for photos based on those categories. As with searching by people, checking any box next to a category will cause PhotoMesa to show only those photos that are categorized with the checked category.
Note that while searching for multiple people defaults to an intersection (i.e., only photos containing every selected person are shown), searching for multiple categories defaults to a union (i.e., only photos showing any one or more selected categories are shown). This default behavior can be changed by right-clicking on any column header in the People or Category view and selecting the appropriate option from the context menu.
Photos can be searched for based on the year or month the photos were taken. As this date information comes directly from the digital camera that the photo was taken with, this information does not need to be manually annotated.