Windows 7: "Add a search filter" greyed out

I haven't been able to find a solution for this:

I have an explorer window open, either pointed to the root of my C: drive, or to some folder (say C:\data). When I click the Search window, the drop-down appears showing previous searches, but the "Add a search filter" is greyed out.

What's causing that?

Hi Selden,

Have you read through this thread? Might be a solution here: How do I add search filters?

Cheers,

Walker
Windows Outreach Team

Hello Selden, and welcome to Seven Forums.

In addition the yellow TIP box in the tutorial below may help with this as well.

Search in Windows 7

Hope this helps,
Shawn

How do you "add a search filter" when it is always grayed out? I have not seen this question DIRECTLY answered by anyone.
I gave up on the Windows 7 search long ago and use Search Everything and Cathy instead, but would still like an answer to that question since I occasionally do use the Windows 7 search.
Edit: Nevermind, I see what is meant by that now. Very unclear.

Hello Bily,

You do not really add a filter, but select one instead. The yellow TIP box in the tutorial link above can help show you more on this though.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Google couldn't seem to figure this one out for me and no matter what I tried the 'add a search filter' option was always greyed out. Supposedly Windows 7 would know what I needed for filters based on folder type but then why couldn't I have a dimension filter in a picture library?

Turns out I could. By querying the search box. I thought it might be crazy enough to work and after a bit of poking around I found that it does.

dimensions:>599 x

as a search parameter will return all images 600px+ wide. I think the colon tells the search that this is an attribute filter as opposed to a text search. The left side is whatever attribute you want to search on. You get <>=(looks like = is default, in other words an exact match) and I assume other operators you might care to experiment with. This would be in fact the actual filter as set by the string on the right. When I say string I mean it literally. I haven't tested enough to make this claim as fact but it looks like it's a mix of the operator, the number value, and then a string weighted against what you would see in Explorer as the value of the attribute. What I mean by this is that 'dimensions:>599 x' will return on width but 'dimensions:>599' (no trailing nbsp and 'x') will return on both height and width. Whatever is a match in the '800 x 600 (for example)' string you would see in Explorer. So in this particular case, searching on image dimensions, ' x' would return on width, and 'x ' would return on height.

Pardon my enthusiasm here but this is frikan brilliant. It boggles my mind that my searches on this matter turned up a lot of deflecting corpspeak and zero mention of this awesome tool. There must be potential here to filter by any attribute in whatever capacity one might need. The 'add' option being greyed out I dunno. I'm on 64 Pro and all I can figure is that it's an unfinished piece that they didn't clean up before release. OR (still unfinished yes) clicking the 'add a filter' shoulda/woulda brought up a dialogue to plug in the discussion above. Too bad, cause it rocks.
No doubt some smart cookie out there will find a way to combine search criteria as well. I poked around a bit with semi-colons and pipes but no luck. However, for example, consider this,

'dimensions:>599 x' returns all images 600px+ width. Re-querying this result set with 'size:>100 kb' filters out everything under 100 kb.

What couldn't you do with this? Every possible attribute attached to any file type looks to be within reach so in theory you couldn't query anything that it couldn't return exactly as you needed. It's all there for you to experiment with so please don't ask me for a quick fix. Get in there and play.

Enjoy.

and oh groan yes i see this is an 'old' question. i dunno why some insist on pointing this out when searches are immemorial. so there.

I forgot to mention...

Again on the pictures themes but I have to assume this would work with any date. If you query the search box with 'datetaken:' a date picker pops up after you type the colon. Whatever dialogues might apply to other criteria might be worth investigating as well.

So weird that it's all there but yet...

REBBAY, great find!
I stopped the indexing by Windows of my drive long ago because Windows search seemed to be so useless so I have to wait to try it out and get results.
But, a preliminary test on "datetaken:‎" in a folder of jpegs DOES turn up a CALENDAR and a list of choices like "A long time ago", "Yesterday", etc.
How long they worked on Vista and Windows 7 and yet left this vital part of their search engine unfinished?? This is really bad considering they touted over and over how wonderful the search engine for Windows 7 was.