Performing a Property Search

By default, the Beagle search tool looks for search terms in the text of documents and in their metadata. To search for a word in a particular property, use property:query. For example, author:john searches for files that have “john” listed in the Author property.

Table 4.1. Supported Property Keywords

Keyword

Applies to

Property

album

Music files

Name of album

artist

Music file

Name of artist

author

Document

Author of the document (same as Creator of the Document)

creator

Document

Creator of the document, mapped to dc:creator (for example, creator of PDF files)

email

Address book

E-mail address

extension or ext

File

File extension (for example, extension:jpeg or ext:mp3). Use extension: or ext: to search in files with no extension.

genre

Music file

Genre of music

imagecomment

Image file

Comments and descriptions found in images that have an IPTC caption or Exif comment

imagemodel

JPEG image

Model of camera (for example, EOS2D)

imagetag

Image file

F-Spot and Digikam image tags, and IPTC keywords

mailfrom

E-mail

Name of sender

mailfromaddr

E-mail

E-mail address of sender

mailinglist

E-mail

Id of mailing list (for example, dashboard-hackers.gnome.org)

mailto

E-mail

Name of recipient

mailtoaddr

E-mail

E-mail address of recipient

speakingto

Chat

Speaker

title

Document

Title of document, mapped to dc:title (for example, title tag of HTML files)


Property searches follow the rules mentioned in Section 4.2, “Search Tips”. You can use property searches as an OR query or as an exclusion query, and phrases can be used as query. For example, the following line will search for all PDF or HTML documents containing the word “apple” whose author property contains “john” and whose title does not contain the word “oranges”:

apple ext:pdf OR ext:html author:john -title:oranges