MacOS Photos app has a pretty advanced search, I can search for trees, ships, places, dates and it returns photos that match that. Yet, I can't search for "Black and White" photographs. Why is that ?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: MacOS Photos app
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.0
Have you tried a Smart Album with
"Text is Monochrome?"
It's not perfect, but you can see above that I got a little over 200 hits, so it gets a bunch of them. You could add a "Monochrome" keyword to those, and then do a search for keyword "not monochrome" and see if you find others to add the keyword to. I got some Sepia pictures when I did that. So I manually picked those out and added the keyword. You can use Keyword Shortcuts to make it fast…
As to "why," there's no way we can answer that. My guess is that there are just too many ways that something can be monochrome. They're all really color, in a way, and Black & White is just a setting
in the editor.
Have you tried a Smart Album with
"Text is Monochrome?"
It's not perfect, but you can see above that I got a little over 200 hits, so it gets a bunch of them. You could add a "Monochrome" keyword to those, and then do a search for keyword "not monochrome" and see if you find others to add the keyword to. I got some Sepia pictures when I did that. So I manually picked those out and added the keyword. You can use Keyword Shortcuts to make it fast…
As to "why," there's no way we can answer that. My guess is that there are just too many ways that something can be monochrome. They're all really color, in a way, and Black & White is just a setting
in the editor.
Thanks. "Monochrome" in the search worked, but like you say it also got a lot of old faded color photos.
I looked for monochrome pictures, and I found about 700, so the original search got less than a third of the monochrome pictures.
Boy, it's hard. I had to reject a lot of just faded old color pictures.
Searching for black and white photos in MacOS Photos app
