Description

Try it live in your browser — launch the WordPress Playground demo. Boots a WordPress instance with this plugin active and a Media Library seeded with 8 attachments, so you can see the cross-field search in action immediately. Searching mountain returns 6 hits (matches in filename and alt text included) — core WordPress search would only find 3.

This plugin is made for:

Search through all fields in Media Library, including: ID, title, caption, alternative text and description.
Search Taxonomies for Media, include the name, slug and description fields.
Search media file name.
Multi-term search — Anywhere in the WordPress admin (the Media Library list view at upload.php, the “Add Media” modal, and other admin screens), use commas to search for multiple items at once (e.g. image-a.jpg, photo-2.jpg). Matches attachments containing any of the terms. Limited to 10 terms per search. Frontend searches still treat commas as literal characters, as a query-amplification guard for public pages.
Use shortcode [mse-search-form] to insert a media search form in posts and template files. It will search for media by all fields mentioned above.

Screenshots

Demo search on the Media Library screen.
Demo search on the Insert Media – Media Library screen.

Installation

Using The WordPress Dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
Search for ‘media-search-enhanced’
Click ‘Install Now’
Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area
Select media-search-enhanced.zip from your computer
Click ‘Install Now’
Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

Download media-search-enhanced.zip
Extract the media-search-enhanced directory to your computer
Upload the media-search-enhanced directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

FAQ

How to link media to the file itself rather than the attachment page in media search results page?

Please add the following code to the functions.php in your theme:

function my_get_attachment_url( $url, $post_id ) {

    $url = wp_get_attachment_url( $post_id );

    return $url;
}
add_filter( 'mse_get_attachment_url', 'my_get_attachment_url', 10, 2 );

Reviews

Frederickson April 23, 2026

Very, very happy with this plugin and the support received from the developer who was kind enough to add a massive time-saving update to this plugin which nows allows to search multiple images at the same time in the Wordpress multimedia image library by using a comma as separator between the images that you want to look up. This is a massive time saver if you want to look up ranges of different images / photos in your image library and for instance delete these when updating product or other image catalogs in Wordpress or Woocommerce websites / stores. Thanks a lot for the excellent update, Yoren! Frederick

bhasic February 8, 2024

Searching with this will use all resources and cripple your site. Don’t install this. Developer doesn’t update this.

Tomas Eklund December 21, 2021

I’ve noticed that a few other users on the support pages have reported that this plugin, which hasn’t been updated for the last two years, no longer works as intended. In fact, it breaks the media library search functionality completely. I can attest to this. This is very unfortunate as the functionality that this plugin seemingly used to provide would be very useful to me.

waterdandelions November 1, 2019

I find this plugin really convenient because I name my media files only with alphabets, but I write the alternative text in my non-alphabetical language. After the installation, I can search both titles and ALT text. Also, it is a plus that it needs no set-up. I am really grateful to the developer for creating and maintaining this useful plugin.

Baharehtz July 10, 2017 1 reply

I had problems with finding in media library search the images that I have added in the passed few years, searching them with the file name wasn’t working at all.. till I installed this plugin, things start to work and I don’t have anymore this problem! Great job! Thanks.

Ken Gagne March 29, 2017 1 reply

This plugin was essential for my photoblog and its thousands of media library files. How else could I ever expect to find what I was looking for?

Read all 28 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Media Search Enhanced” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

“Media Search Enhanced” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Media Search Enhanced” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.0.0

New: Multi-term search — use commas to search for multiple items at once anywhere in wp-admin, including the Media Library list view and the “Add Media” modal (e.g. sunset.jpg, logo.png). Limited to 10 terms. Frontend searches still treat commas as literal characters.
Performance: Replaced LEFT JOINs + DISTINCT with EXISTS subqueries, eliminating temporary tables and improving search speed up to 10x on large media libraries.
Performance: Numeric searches (e.g. searching by attachment ID) now use exact integer matching instead of string comparison, enabling primary key index usage.
Compatibility: The plugin no longer overwrites the entire WHERE clause. Conditions from WordPress core and other plugins are now preserved.
Security: Fixed reflected XSS in the search form placeholder.
Security: Private attachments are now only visible to users with appropriate permissions (editors/admins see all; authors see only their own).
Developer: Added mse_max_search_terms filter to customize the multi-term cap (default 10). Added mse_allow_multi_term_search filter to customize where multi-term search is allowed; defaults to is_admin().

0.9.2

Security enhancements.

0.9.1

Fix: Prevent “Not unique table/alias: wp_postmeta” SQL error by aliasing the postmeta JOIN. Props @mikemeinz. See https://wordpress.org/support/topic/sql-syntax-error-26/

0.9.0

Added the languages pt_BR and es_ES. Thanks to @larodiel.
Fixed an issue when searching for images in the Image block, the plugin caused the HTTP 500 error. Also thanks to @larodiel.

0.8.1

Fix PHP notices and updated the “Tested up to” field.

0.8.0

Supporting MIME type and date filters when searching in the Media Library. Thanks to @jedifunk for spotting this bug.

0.7.3

Fix PHP warnings. Thanks to @DavidOn3.

0.7.2

Bug fix: Make the search work with WPML Media – All languages.
Filter the search form if it’s on the media search results page.
Make the images clickable in the search results. Can be disabled by setting the filter mse_is_image_clickable to false.

0.7.1

Bug fix: Remove duplicate search results when WPML plugin is activated, THE RIGHT WAY.

0.7.0

Remove duplicate search results when WPML plugin is activated. Props @joseluiscruz.

0.6.1

Security update: use $wpdb->prepare to process SQL statements. Thanks to @daxelrod for this.

0.6.0

Add ID to search fields.
Modify the clauses with posts_clauses filter.

0.5.4

Add filter mse_get_attachment_url to modify the attachment URLs in the media search results.

0.5.3

Bug fix: Filtered excerpt should be returned, not echoed.

0.5.2

Display thumbnails in the media search results.

0.5

Use shortcode [mse-search-form] to insert a media search form in posts, which only searches for media files (through all fields).

0.4

Search media file name.

0.3

If there are Taxonomies for Media, search the name, slug and description fields.

0.2.1

Add DISTINCT statement to SQL when query media in the “Insert Media” screen

0.2.0

The first version

Excellent plugin and support!

Don’t install, will cripple your site

No longer working – breaks media search completely

Wonderful plug-and-play plugin that lets me search through alt text

It saves me!

Essential!