I have just scanned and imported a couple of hundred photos. After import I have renamed most. I have ben trying to find specific pics using the search function. I assumed that it would search by title, but it doesn't seem to be working. For instance I know that there are 3 photos amongst 12,339 that are called 'portrait'. If I put his into the search (search by 'all' because it doesn't offer title) I get about 500 pictures selected and only one of the portrait's!........ what's going on?

Any suggestions gratefully received.

As near as I can tell, the Search function in iPhoto only searches metadata, iPhoto title, album title, event name, keyword, or date. It doesn't search, and isn't intended to search, filenames, for two reasons: most filenames on digital photos are meaningless, and iPhoto can accommodate different photos that happen to have the same filename.

Rather than naming all the files, what you should have done in order to be able to search them is left the names alone and given them titles in iPhoto.

Thanks for your reply, it's helpful, but I am now slightly confused about the difference between a name and a title.
What I have changed is the file name/number/title at the bottom of the photo in the standard view. With my scanner it would be something like IMG0023. I have changed this to what I want the picture to be called. Is this a name or a title?

Thanks

It might be instructive for you to go to your home folder ~/Photos, control+click (or right click) on iPhoto Library and select show package contents on the drop down menu. There you will find a plethora of folders and files that in total constitute the iPhoto Library. Warning it is alright to look at what is inside a package like iPhoto Library, but moving or renaming files or folders in the package can be fatal to the health of the library structure. Look but don't touch!

When you have a new photo in the library it will initially be assigned a Title of the essentially meaningless name of the file as read from the camera or other source. When you overwrite that name in iPhoto the physical name of the file is not changed but the Title is changed from say 100_0047.JPG to The kids with Santa or whatever you chose. Titles, version names, Keywords, captions, the GPS coordinates where the photo was taken, faces found in the image, etc. are stored as metadata with the file. Access to the image files, the organization of those image files into albums, projects, etc. is all handled by various index files in the iPhoto Library package.

If you want the physical file name to match the Title of the image then change the name of the file before you import it into iPhoto (or Aperture).

If you change it in iPhoto, you're changing the title. That ought to be searchable with iPhoto's Search command.

If you're using iPhoto's built-in search engine (as tacit has suggested) you may want to try searching for your photos using a different engine.

I suggest that you start with OS X's built-in Spotlight, and if you can't work with it try EasyFind (Freeware).

Thanks I will try these ideas.

As joemikeb pointed out, renaming before adding to iPhoto would have accomplished what you thought would happen. To help you do this there is an excellent piece of software that I have used for exactly what you were trying to do, called Better Finder Rename [no affiliation].