Graphic Workshop Professional includes a powerful Search function to locate graphics anywhere on a hard drive. It will recursively work its way through an entire directory tree, or any portion thereof you like, and create a list of every graphic file it finds. It can also be more selective, listing only files of specific types, or which have file names that contain specific strings.

Search will search through hidden directories, and it will locate graphic files buried in places where they're not usually found, such as the \WINDOWS directory of a hard drive. In that it displays thumbnails for its results, it will let you visually examine the graphics it has located to determine whether they call for further investigation.

It's worth noting that Graphic Workshop's Search function can't search for images of specific subjects, that is, analyze graphics to see what they look like.

To open Graphic Workshop's Search function, click on the magnifying glass button in its tool bar, or select Search from its File menu. A Search window will appear.

The Search window tool bar has many of the same buttons as the main Graphic Workshop Professional tool bar, as Search can perform many of the same functions on the files it finds.

The file list of a Search window will be empty when the window first opens, as Graphic Workshop won't have searched for anything yet. As such, the first thing a new Search window will do is to open a Search Options dialog, the window by which you tell Search what to look for and where, and then put it to work.

The left portion of a Search Options dialog is a folder navigation tree, similar to the one in the left portion of a conventional Graphic Workshop Professional browser window. In this case, you'll use it to point search to the folder you want it to start searching in.

If you select the root folder of a hard drive, Search will search the entire hard drive. If you point it to a specific folder, Search will search the folder you've selected and any sub-folders therein. Note that it will always search everything in and below the selected folder, so folders within folders will be searched as well.

As with a Graphic Workshop Professional browser window, you can access the hard drives of other computers connected to yours over a Windows network, as long as they have been assigned local drive letters.

The right portion of a Search Options window will let you tell Search what to look for. Here are a few of the common applications of these options:

• Search for all the graphic files on a hard drive that Graphic Workshop knows how to work with.
• Search for any combination of graphic files on a hard drive that Graphic Workshop knows how to work with, such as all the GIF, ART and JPG files.
• Search for specific "wild card" specifications for files, such as B*.JPG, for all the JPG files that start with the letter B.
• Apply any of the foregoing searches and then "filter" the resulting file names. For example, you could have it find all the graphic files on a hard drive with the word "green" in their file names.
• Run multiple searches, with different search options in each, and display the cumulative results in a single list.

Once Search has completed a search, it will display a list of items. Each item will include a small thumbnail image of the file in question, its file name, its size, its creation date and its location.

The items in a Search list will behave very much like files in a conventional Graphic Workshop Professional browser window. You can double-click on them to view them in a full-screen View window, convert them to other formats, print them and so on.

Note that if you convert or otherwise batch-process files from a Search window, you can have the new files created by Graphic Workshop written to a new folder, or you can have search write them to the same folders as the source files it has processed were found it.

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