You can search somewhat anything on ipernity. But what you may not know are all the tweaks you can do to limit the search.


Search for all cat photos (up to 1000)

Write simply cat on top of the pages, onto field with "Search for people and more...", and select "Search for photos" from the drop down menu.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?w=0&q=cat

The default search parameters then give you the most relevant photos where somewhere on the image title, caption, keywords or comments appears the string cat. There can be images also on caterpillars, Catalonia and advocates. But the bottom line is that you at least get approximately good results on that subject.

Because there are a lot of images having cat mentioned, the ipernity search gives you only up to 1000 most relevant images. The limit there is very likely to keep the search fast and inexpensive enough. To list, count and go through all the matching images would take time and money, and is just "impractical". Similarly you may have noticed that Google gives you a notice:


So, the rest have left out intentionally because usually people are only interested on the first few pages of search results.

Get a little more advanced...

If you wish to exclude catepillars and advocates, then put the cat between quotation marks like this: "cat".

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?opt=&q=%22cat%22&w=0&t=0&lic=&s=0

Then on the search results page try to click on link options▾, and click the button [SEARCH].

Now it is worth to have a little look on the URL string and see what the parameters there are. Parameter q= lists all the keywords used by you, w= is for possible user account number where the search is limited, t= can be used to limit the search on photos or videos only, lic= is for license type, and s= is for choosing between relevance, most popular and most recent.

Particular person's most recent cat photos

It is then possible to search only one user's photos where the keyword string "cat" appears somewhere on title, caption, keywords and comments. First choose the user and go to her/his account and photos, and run the photo search from the drop down menu under the [Photos] on top tool bar. Then go to advanced search and choose [The most recent first] from the last drop down menu.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?view=1&opt=1&q=%22cat%22&w=304817&t=0&lic=&s=2

Or do the same for one of your contacts by choosing the person from the second drop down menu. Select first [Choose a contact], and then click again on the text changed into [--choose--] to see a list of all your contacts.

All most recent photos

If you have ever wanted to see all the most recent images uploaded to ipernity, then you can start with some search keyword like a letter a.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?w=0&q=a

Then choose options, and "The mos recent first (posted date)" from the last menu. Finally remove the search keyword to run an "empty search".

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?opt=1&q=&w=0&t=0&lic=&s=2

Keep in mind you again get only up to first one thousand.

Boolean operators

For my surprise also Boolean operators can be used. They then are written with capital letters: AND, OR, NOT

For example one can run a photo search for cat AND dog to find photos where both search words appear somewhere on image title, keywords, caption, or on comments. The AND operator turns into + (plus) on search field.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?w=0&q=cat+dog

Or try to find photos where the word cat appears, but not the word dog. Then you write cat NOT dog on the search field. The NOT operator turns into - (minus) on the searches.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?opt=&q=cat+-dog&w=0&t=0&lic=&s=0

Also Boolean operator OR may turn out useful sometimes. So, you can write cat OR dog on the group search field to find either. The OR operator becomes replaced with | (pipe) on the search field.

www.ipernity.com/search/group?w=0&q=cat+OR+dog

Finally you can try something even more sophisticated, and run search:

("cat" OR "dog") NOT car

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?opt=&q=%28%22cat%22+OR+%22Dog%22%29+NOT+car&w=0&t=0&lic=&s=0

What you get is photos where appears exactly only "cat", documents where appears exactly "dog", or also documents where both can appear, but there should be no car.

Limitations

There seem to be some limitations though. For example one can not run an "empty search" and exclude a certain string. Tested and found out it just does not work.

www.ipernity.com/search/photo?opt=1&q=+-jewel&w=0&t=0&lic=&s=2

Moreover, the fact that the search indeed covers also caption, keywords and comments, it sometimes seem to give too much. But on the other hand having comments included may often turn out as useful. Comments made by other users may give valuable description and alternative search words for you and for all to find something on some very specific topic. For example someone else may know the Latin name for a flower, write that on the comment, and then finding that image with the given latin name becomes possible to all.

Sometimes the ipernity search also seem to have a long memory. Every time someone runs a search, it becomes recorded onto index database. To get that database updated according to changes done on documents (photos, videos, blog articles) may take some time. It means one can get search results on words that no longer exists anywhere on the page (title, caption, comments and keywords). However, the index database do become updated eventually.

Update(s)

I noticed that the "empty search" does not work for blog articles. Then the advice is to try giving some very common symbol as a keyword like letter a (q=a):

www.ipernity.com/search/blog?view=2&opt=1&q=a&w=0&lic=&s=2

In the same way one has to give some "seed" for the search on groups:

www.ipernity.com/search/group?view=2&opt=1&q=a&w=0&s=2&m=0

Moreover, there is no additional options for album search. Therefore one can not list for example most recent albums created or most recently updated albums.