Search Photos library for text in images

Software
1

With all the text recognition features in iOS 15 and Monterey, I assumed Photos would be gaining the ability to index the recognized text in all images in your library and easily return matches when doing normal searches within the app. As far as I can tell, however, this is not in fact the case.

Confusingly, iOS claims this feature, but it only works in Spotlight search not Photos’ own search as far as I can see.

Is this right? Am I missing something?

This is a frustrating limitation. (Spotlight is fine, but it is clumsy and much less effective than filtering the whole Photos database directly as Photos search does. It also doesn’t work on Mac.)

2

I wonder why yours is not working. My ocr works magnificently in Photos in both the iOS and Mac OS!

Very strange.

It is such a wonderful feature.

4

As @anon20961960 said below: OCR (to copy text from the currently-displayed image) does work.

What is missing is an index of the text content in all photos for the purpose of searching in the Photos app.

But weirdly, such an index does seem to exist — it’s just restricted to Spotlight on iOS, not the Photos app and nowhere on Mac.