It all depends on whether the gallery block you are using puts the captions into the search index. Look through the controller.php for the gallery block you are using and see if it contains a function getSearchableContent(). This is the function C5 calls when re-indexing the site search, so for your gallery captions to be indexed, they will need to be returned as text from this function.

As an alternative, I have found C5 sites to be well indexed by Google, so you could include a Google search and forget about the internal site search. There are several free Google and extended search blocks in the marketplace.

I am a photographer myself and am in the process of redeveloping my own photography site in C5. I will be relying on Google for my own site search.

PS. There is also a file search (paid) add-on that searches file attributes (such as captions)

Thanks John,I think maybe I'll sit and try and work out an alternative, maybe just create a hard coded search page linking to phpmyadmin or the block mysql buddy and display the page content the traditional way.

It's nearly the weekend so I can relax and think about what to do.

Thanks again

I like John's idea of the file list addon, or if you're familiar with the File List model itself you could build your own custom search results page that uses a simple search query (from a $_GET variable if you so desire) to look up files by keyword).

Thanks beebs, I'll look at making a single page. Like I said concrete 5 is relatively new to me and finding out what it can do is taking a while but I'm getting there.

thanks again