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Flywheel indexes all data and metadata for search - including any custom metadata. This article helps you understand search capabilities in Flywheel and choose the right approach for your needs.

Choose Your Path

New to Flywheel?

If you are new to Flywheel and want to learn the basics of finding and viewing data, start with our tutorial:

Getting Started: Finding Data in Flywheel

This tutorial will walk you through:

  • Signing in to Flywheel
  • Understanding how Flywheel organizes data
  • Two methods for finding data
  • Viewing images in the Flywheel viewer

Need to Find Specific Data?

If you already know Flywheel basics and need to locate specific data, use our how-to guide:

How to Locate Your Data

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for:

  • Using search to find data across projects
  • Navigating through projects to find data
  • Viewing images from search results or sessions
  • Troubleshooting common issues

Choosing a Search Method

Use Basic Search When

  • You want to quickly find data without building complex queries
  • You know some information about your data but not exact values
  • You need fuzzy matching (finds approximate matches, not just exact matches)
  • You want to use simple filters like project, file type, modality, or date ranges
  • You are exploring data and want to browse results

Use Advanced Search When

  • You need exact matching for specific field values
  • You want to search on any field in your data, including deeply nested custom metadata
  • You need to combine multiple search criteria with complex logic (AND/OR combinations)
  • You want to use regular expressions or wildcard matching
  • You need to save and reuse queries
  • You require precise control over how terms are compared

Enter a term into the search bar to perform a basic search. You can filter results by project, file type, modality, classification, session timestamp, sex, subject age, or by custom fields.

Basic search uses fuzzy matching to find results. This means that you will also see results that approximately match your search term, not just the exact term. For exact matching use Advanced Search.

See our Basic search article for more information.

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Advanced Search is a powerful tool that allows you to search on any field in your Flywheel data, including custom metadata. Advanced Search includes both a visual query editor as well as the ability to build a query using FlyQL, which is an SQL-like language. You can also save queries.

See our Advanced Search article for more information on Advanced Search and FlyQL.

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Working with Search Results

Once you have your search results, you can perform bulk actions on all of the data:

  • Download Downloads the selected data as a tar file
  • Add to Collection: Collections to organize their data to meet their unique needs. This feature can be used to create customs views, organize data within a Project or across Projects by Subject, modality, or research topic. Learn more about collections.
  • Run Batch Gear: Start a gear job to run against all of the selected files. We will cover gears later on in this guide.
  • Delete Data: Delete the selected files.
  • Move sessions to a new project or subject: Move all selected files to a new project or subject. Learn more about moving sessions.
  • Create new sessions: Create a new session with the selected files.

Troubleshooting

No Results Found

Problem: Your search returns no results even though you know the data exists.

Solutions:

  • Verify you have permission to the projects containing the data. Search only returns results from projects you can access.
  • Check if your filters are too restrictive. Try removing filters one at a time to identify which is excluding your data.
  • If using Basic Search, try a shorter or more general search term. Fuzzy matching works best with partial terms.
  • If using Advanced Search, verify your query syntax is correct. Even small typos can prevent matches.
  • Ensure the data has been indexed. Newly uploaded data may take a few minutes to appear in search results.

Too Many Results

Problem: Your search returns thousands of results and you cannot find what you need.

Solutions:

  • Add more filters to narrow down results. Combine multiple criteria like date range, file type, and modality.
  • Use Advanced Search for exact matching instead of Basic Search fuzzy matching.
  • Filter by project if you know which project contains your data.
  • Use the Session Timestamp filter to limit results to a specific time period.

Search Is Slow

Problem: Search takes a long time to return results.

Solutions:

  • Limit the scope by filtering to specific projects before searching.
  • Avoid overly broad queries that search across all fields.
  • If searching custom metadata, be as specific as possible with field names.
  • Consider if you really need to search all accessible projects, or if you can narrow to specific projects.

Custom Field Not Appearing

Problem: You cannot find a custom metadata field in Advanced Search.

Solutions:

  • Verify the field exists on your data by checking the metadata in the UI.
  • Wait a few minutes for newly added fields to be indexed.
  • Check the exact field path. Custom fields are typically under file.info, session.info, subject.info, or acquisition.info.
  • If the field name contains spaces, remember to wrap it in quotes in FlyQL: "subject.info.Field Name".

Unexpected Results

Problem: Search returns files that do not seem to match your criteria.

Solutions:

  • Remember that Basic Search uses fuzzy matching. Switch to Advanced Search for exact matches.
  • Check AND/OR logic in Advanced Search. Ensure term groups are connected correctly.
  • Verify filter combinations. When selecting multiple items in the same filter category, they use OR logic. Different categories use AND logic.
  • Review the search results carefully. The matching criteria may be in fields you did not expect.

Cannot Save Query

Problem: You cannot save your Advanced Search query.

Solutions:

  • Ensure you are using Advanced Search, not Basic Search. Only Advanced Search supports saved queries.
  • Check that your query is syntactically valid before attempting to save.