vladstudio One thing that surprised me, though, is how search works (when you type something in search bar).
It seems to only filter whatever is listed on current screen, so frankly, it is not particularly useful (I could use Cmd-F in browser to achieve same results).
That is why the input on top is called "filter" and not "search". Of course, global search is a totally different feature, and useful in it's own way. I wouldn't agree with you that "filter" is not useful though ... It's very effective to find specific images on the page, or show only certain file types like "PDF", or showing only "landscape" images, or search images by camera or other exif tags.
Let's say you have 500 images, and it filter down results to 20 results that match the filter. Much more effective than cmd-f, which would still show all 500 images, require jumping huge leaps in scroll, would still load all 500 images on scroll, and could really only be used for file names ... and in the end, it's just not even closely as effective and intuitive. It might not be useful for you, but you can't say it's not useful.
vladstudio I understand this is probably the easiest implementation -- from what I see, it is completely front-end. A recursive search (from current folder) or global search (from root folder) would be so much more useful. Sure it is another call to backend, but it is really worth it.
I don't disagree that this would be useful, but to be clear, these are two different features global "search" and "filter". About global search, it has an entirely different technical implementation of course. Each time you trigger a search, it has to connect to the server PHP, which in turn has to run a recursive glob()
through ALL dirs and files in your entire directory structure. Let's say you have a few 100 dirs/files OK, but if you have 1000's of files and folders, this process will be quite slow. Then imagine 10+ visitors using this search at the same time, it could bring shared servers to their knees and even cause timeouts. Also, you should not expect real-time search (like in filters), as this could cause some serious havoc (it may or may not, but all depends on the depth of content in the users folders vs server speed). Then finally what would you like to search for? File names would be acceptable, but then if you want to also search inside image meta data (EXIF/IPTC) for all images in your entire folder structure, it would be very very slow (we would need to loop through all images in your entire structure, extract IPTC/EXIF, for each search).
Anyway, I'm sure you get the picture. Global search is definitely on the radar, but there are loads of precautions that need to be made. Files app does not control your files or use a database, so we can't just search through a database like any other desktop or web app would do for this purpose. We might need to find a way to cache a search index, for example in JSON format.
Search has been requested before and will be implemented at some point, but it won't work like "filter" does obviously.