Searching by Color
When you remember what something looked like rather than what it was called, try searching by color. Poly ranks your images and videos by how strongly they feature the color you pick. Create color mood boards, find specific brand colors, or just explore your library by hue.
Running a color search
- Open search (
⌘ K) and click the filter icon to expand the search options. - Open the Similarity dropdown and choose Color similarity.
- Your system color picker opens — pick a hue or enter a hex code.
The color appears as a Similar to chip showing the swatch and its hex value. Click the swatch to change the color, or × to remove it. Results update as you adjust.
What it searches
Color search covers images and videos — for videos, the sampled visual segments are matched, so a film with a strongly red scene surfaces for red. Documents, audio, and text aren't color-matched.
Color matching is deliberately forgiving: it uses a lower relevance bar than other searches, since "contains this color" is a looser question than "means this phrase".
Combining with other filters
A color chip stacks with everything else in the filter panel. Scope it to a folder, limit it to images, or restrict the date range:
color ≈ #14bd99 + Images + under //Home/brand + modified this year
Multiple colors, from the terminal
The app picks one color at a time; the CLI accepts up to eight, for palette-style queries:
# One color
poly search --near-color "#14bd99" --include-type image
# A brand palette
poly search --near-color "#14bd99" --near-color "#2e97fa" --near-color "#161616" \
--under //Home/brand
Where the colors come from
Color similarity is computed from the same visual embeddings that power search by file, generated when an image or video is indexed. Video color searches will still match the precise segments. Media becomes color-searchable as soon as its Similarity stage completes.