Version 1.0.0’s search interface is pretty bare-bones.
Got a favorite search UX that you think would make building searches faster/easier/more approachable?
Please suggest it here!
Related:
I quite like the YouTrack Search UI.
It has autocomplete, but with keyword hints and feedback. eg, tag: then shows a list of tags in the autocomplete dropdown.
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There are many options to search but not necessarily easy to remember or implement. Personally I find that the Find Message search in Thunderbird is very intuitive. One adds command s one by one with all options available.
How about an “advanced/basic” toggle that lets users enter their own SQLITE query directly? I’m really fond of this feature/UI in the Atlassian JIRA bug tracker software which you can see it in action at https://jira.atlassian.com/issues
Your existing easy-to-use syntax can stay as-is, but users wanting more unique/advanced queries don’t need to install separate software or wait for you to consider implementing it. For example for Search for single KW (exclusively) and Search by color
And if some requested item is not already indexed, I assume it’s less work for you to add a new PhotoStructure | PhotoStructure's advanced settings that adds such-and-such to the index without additionally immediately having to decide the plain-language syntax. For example the duration column you consider in Please suggest other search examples - #23 by mrm, and the columns implicitly suggested in the previous links for number of people and for color name.
I am a geek so I like the idea of searching in a SQL-like syntax.
But to be clear, JIRA’s advanced search is not a direct SQL against the database, which would be super dangerous and not all that easy (probably lots of joins are abstracted). It’s “JQL” as they call it, which they note: "JQL isn’t a database query language, even though it uses SQL-like syntax. "
Just discovered PhotoStructure last week, and it’s pretty damn close to something I’ve been looking for, literally for years. Still testing it out to make sure it will work for my use case (my library is… large) but it’s looking really promising.
I’m currently running 2.1 (I know, it’s alpha, but I’m reasonably technical, have good backups, and don’t mind rebuilding libraries) because there were too many juicy features to pass up 
One of my biggest issues (in general, not just PhotoStructure) is search. I have a lot of media and a lot of tags, and finding stuff in a large library (from all my devices! that’s important!) is key.
While search in PhotoStructure works, I’ve been using an app on my phone called HashPhotos, and honestly it’s the fastest/easiest media search (and tagging, although I know PhotoStructure doesn’t do tagging yet) I’ve yet encountered, and thought I’d note some of the ways it makes searching large libraries easier in case they might be useful in PhotoStructure.
Most importantly, when you have a ton of hierarchical keywords and can’t always remember the structure off the top of your head, is suggestions as you type. This is insanely useful, and I would love love love (and honestly pay) to have that as a feature (I mean, I’ll be paying anyway but killer feature!).
Keywords are searched just by typing in the keyword with no special prefix. As you type it searches both flat keywords and hierarchical keywords.
My suggestion, apart from HashPhotos’s way of doing it, would be when you select a hierarchical keyword, if it has children, those are then displayed as suggestions. Then you can either just hit enter to accept the parent, or use the down arrow to select a child (which then repeats).
For example, if I typed bird It might suggestion Animals|Birds and maybe Sky|Birds Flying (bad example, but you get the idea). If I selected Animals|Birds it would then display a list like Animals|Birds (the default if you just hit enter, and below it) Animals|Birds|Seagull and Animals|Birds|Swan, etc. which I could select using the arrows if I liked, allowing me to quickly narrow down results.
Properties are mostly prefixed by #, so for example to find raw files, you can type #raw (and of course as soon as you type # a list of properties comes up, re search suggestions above). Favorites are #favorite, etc.
Dates / time ranges are usually prefixed with an @ symbol. @today, @2020, @2020-09-21 for example.
You can combine any types of search criteria (keywords, properties, dates, etc). To add multiple search criteria, you select one from the list (or use a terminator character, like comma) which then turns what you typed (assuming it matched something) into it’s own contained element in the search box, placing the cursor after it so you can add more terms. Generally this is an AND search, unless you start adding parenthesis, etc. HashPhotos also has an “AND” and “OR” option that makes the entire search either all AND or all OR, which is nice for quick things (defaults to AND).
To be clear, I’m not suggesting you completely replace your existing system, there’s only so much shortcuts like the above can do, and there are times when you want to search some very specific pieces of info, and adding prefixes to make sure you only search that one thing (the type of camera for example). Not everything can have shortcuts, but the most common things are fast to type without looking in the advanced search manual 
Hope some of that might be slightly useful. Really appreciate what you’ve built here, and hope to be a paid subscriber soon (for support, but also so I can send all my votes to search improvements)! 
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Thanks for that, now I need to go look at hashphoto. One search tool that I really love and would like to see somehow tied into PS from the perspective of quick collections is fzf. I can’t think of how many times I use this to drill in and find things quickly. To have that with the ability to drill into a collection and see the results? Awesome.