[Feature] Search: support natural language dates (e.g. "May 2021", "Mai 2021")

[lucguinchard]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

Allow the main search bar to understand dates typed in natural language and
turn them into a date filter, as Google Photos does.

Examples:

• "May 2021" -> all assets taken between 2021-05-01 and 2021-05-31
• "2021" -> the whole year
• "beach May 2021" -> a "beach" smart search restricted to that month
• Optionally, an explicit operator such as date:2021-05, after:2021-01-01
  or before:2021-06-30.

Today the search bar is a semantic (CLIP) search over image content, so typing
a date does not filter anything. The date range filter in the search panel
does exist, but it requires opening the filters and picking a start and end
date, which is slow when you just want "photos from May 2021".

Why

• It is one of the most common ways people look for photos, and it is a
  frequent pain point for people coming from Google Photos.
• Related requests: [Feature] Natural language input for Date fields - Date of Birth, Editing the date of images etc. #12690 (natural language input for date fields), and
  several requests to sort search results by date ([Feature] Search should be in date order and have timeline #5728, [Feature] Search Results organized by date (an more) #8377, [Feature] In Search add option to sort by date #26540).
• The third-party tool immich-power-tools already offers natural language
  search including dates, which shows there is demand.

Implementation notes

• A date parsing library (like chrono, mentioned in [Feature] Natural language input for Date fields - Date of Birth, Editing the date of images etc. #12690) could extract the
  date expression from the query and map it to the existing date filters of
  the search API, leaving the remaining text for the smart search.
• Localization matters: users search in their own language (e.g. "mai 2021"
  in French). The parser could follow the language set in the app settings,
  or start with English and ISO formats (2021-05) only.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[bo0tzz]

#7264