Google Photos is designed to be where your pictures live, but what good is simple storage if you can't find the shots you're looking for? The app has some great search tools, and in addition to finding pictures featuring a particular subject, it narrows your search based on when you took them. Here's how to search by date to see the photos you want on your Android tablet or phone, iOS device, or the Google Photos web app.

Google Photos organizes photos by date

Opening the Photos app presents your pictures in date order, starting from the ones you snapped or uploaded recently. Pinching in or out on the homepage lets you organize the timeline by days and months. You can use the timeline scroll button on the right side of the screen to navigate to a specific month quickly. If you can't find the button, gently scroll up to show it.

If you're viewing photos on the web, hover your mouse on the extreme right side of the page to reveal the timeline scrollbar, then drag it vertically to navigate pictures uploaded in different months. That's the primary way to search for images by date on Google Photos. But if you're looking for a specific date, like a friend's birthday or pictures from your first date night, you can do a lot with the search bar.

Navigating dates with the timeline scrollbar in Google Photos web app

If you have a long list of photos, you may not want to scroll through the entire list to find the ones you want. When you know the day or month the photo was taken, enter the date in the search bar, and Photos shows the images taken and uploaded to your account on that day.

You can use any combination of search strings. For example, if you're looking for a photo you took in September 2021, enter any of the following search terms to find your photos:

  • September 2021
  • Sep 2021
  • 2021 September
  • 2021 9 (where 9 is the ninth month of the year)

When you want to find photos from a birthday party or a holiday get-together and know the specific date, you can add the date to the search term. For example, if the birthday party was on June 17, 2021, enter any of these search terms:

  • June 17 2021
  • 6/17/2021
  • 6-17-21
  • 6 17 2021
  • 2021 Jun 17

Google Photos accepts any date format, and these date string searches work on the web version and the Android and iOS apps.

Photos can also parse speech-style dates. If you enter "August 1st, 2019," Photos displays the images from that day. Trying the same trick for more general terms isn't as helpful. A search for "Monday" might include screenshots that had Monday in the image's text, returning results based on optical character recognition (OCR) instead of a timeframe.

Google Photos web app showing photos taken August 29, 2022

You can add modifiers to your search, like "dogs 10-14-2020." You can also combine modifiers and ranges, for example, "dogs 2015-2020." Plus, you can search using time modifiers, like "photos before 1-1-2021" or "photos after 1-1-2021."

To further narrow your results, add titles of specific activities or the type of picture. For instance, looking up "selfie Jan 2022" fetches only selfies taken in January 2023.

You can add different search terms like birthdays, portraits, landscapes, or anything else. Adding people's names to the search term also works, provided you've named their face tag. This is a great way to dial into specific photos based on a narrow range. Give it a shot the next time you're looking for one.

Search for pictures by date using Google Assistant

Google Assistant can also help you fetch photos by date from the Photos Android app. Once you're in the app, trigger Google Assistant using your favorite method, then say your request in a speech-style format like:

  • January 28 photos.
  • December 2019 pictures.
  • Pictures from April to August 2023.

You can launch Google Assistant outside the Photos app, but it often pulls images from the web. When talking to Google Assistant in the Photos Android app, include any tip or instance we mentioned earlier, like adding people's names to your request. This helps you experiment with what works and what doesn't.

Keep your Google Photos under control

We have more tricks to help you find your photos faster in Google Photos. Learn how to tame your Google Photos collection and see what you want quickly by tagging people and pets, using the search tool, creating auto-updating live albums, and placing private photos in a locked folder.