Searching

This post covers how to search for photos of Jamie and the pack. There are several different places you can search.

Searching this site

You can search on this site by clicking the search icon (magnifying glass) in the top right corner of the home page, as shown here:

Note that this search option only searches within post titles, tags (such as Pack History), and authors. The author search isn't useful, because all the posts are by the same author, me.

We may enhance this search option to allow searching within the full text of the posts, but we haven't decided on that. To do full-text search we'd need to integrate a search provider, and that costs some money above and beyond what we're already paying to host the site.

Searching Flickr

Since 2009, I've been using use a Flickr account to store all my favorite photos, so that I can search through them myself. You can also search my photos on Flickr, if you're so inclined. You'll need a Flickr account to do this – if you don't have a Flickr account, you can create a free one as covered here.

Once you're logged in to Flickr, you can search all of Flickr for photos. If you've never used Flickr before, here's the documentation for Flickr's search features. Here's an example:

A note on searching for the word dougsfaves. I mentioned earlier that I archive my favorite photos to Flickr, and dougsfaves is a search term that I put on my "favorite favorite" photos, the ones that mean a lot to me or photos that I know I'll want to search for in the future. It's completely subjective, but if you follow Jamie's page you may find that search term useful. I tag about 5% of my photos with dougsfaves.

Note that the example above (and others below) are using the desktop web browser version of Flickr. You can use Flickr on a phone as well, but the search options are more limited. In particular, you can't use the Advanced Search features, which let you search by a date range or other options. Those features are only available in the web browser version of Flickr.

Searching all of Flickr is powerful, but it's probably not what you want most of the time. If you search all of Flickr for Jamie and Alice, you'll find lots of photos of people named Jamie and Alice, in addition to the dogs you're probably looking for. The example above worked because I added dougsfaves to narrow the search, but maybe you want to search through all photos of Jamie and Alice, including the ones I haven't tagged with dougsfaves. How can you do that, without getting photos of people named Jamie and Alice, too?

The solution is to search within a person's photostream. Flickr calls each person's photos their photostream, and I use two photostreams on Flickr: Dougerino (aka Doug Mahugh) and Dogerino (aka Jamie Samoyed). To search within a photostream, just go to that photostream and then click the Search button (magnifying glass icon) there, instead of on the Flickr home page.

The line between my Dougerino and Dogerino photostreams has grown blurry over the years. I had the Dougerino account before we got Jamie, and then when we started the Facebook page when Jamie was 5 months old, I created a separate Dogerino photostream for dog photos. That distinction no longer makes any sense, since dog photos have become the vast majority of my photos now, so dog photos from recent years could appear in either of those places. Photos of Jamie's first 5 months with us are mostly on Dougerino, but photos since then could be on either photostream.

As an example, here are screenshots of search results for "Jamie" and "cabin" on the Dogerino and Dougerino Flickr photostreams:

Now that we know more about how to use Flickr's search options, as an example let's try to find the original photo of Jamie booping Fish on the head.

Searching on Facebook

/// some folks may want to search for a specific post they remember (use an example from Jamie Samoyed and Jamie Samoyed's Pack?)

/// note old page and new group