how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)
there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~
I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:
url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant
url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first
url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order
url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes
url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now
url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc
url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly
url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant)
the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog!
caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks.
if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else
if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims)
You can still get at someone’s archive even if they don’t have a custom theme! Just type in https://whatever.tumblr.com/archive/ as if they did. Still works. (At least it’s still worked for me on every such blog I’ve tried this on.)
You can also do an AND search for two tags at a time like this:
https://silveth.tumblr.com/search/#monkey island #fanfic
(I.e., posts that have both of those tags; not an OR search that returns posts that have one or the other.) This might not be perfect because I think it will also get posts where one or the other is actually in the body of the post, since it’s /search/ and not /tagged/, but in my experience the false positives are few to none. (That works in the global Tumblr search too, by the way.)
[Image description: Screenshot of the Custom Theme setting, which is found on the Blog Settings page. A slider called “Enable custom theme” is in the on position. Text below the slider explains what enabling this setting means. It says “Create a separate theme for your blog. Change the layout. Edit the code. Make an entirely new theme. It’s up to you.” /end ID]
i like this a lot but feel the need to add one major caveat: any of these options that include url.tumblr.com/tagged/ only work if the person running the url.tumblr.com blog tags their posts.
if you’re looking for a post on someone’s blog and that someone didn’t tag the post with anything, you can try url.tumblr.com/search/croissant (if you think the word “croissant” was in the body of the post), url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 (if you know the blog made or reblogged the post on november 5th, 2020), or url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio (if you know it was an audio post), but url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant won’t get you anywhere because it ignores posts that the blog didn’t tag.
if that blog does tag things, you can use the url.tumblr.com/tagged/ options. however, depending on how many posts the blog has used that tag on, it may take longer than a few seconds to find the single post you’re looking for. i tag every post on my blog in case i want to find it later, so i can (and do) use howdydowdy.tumblr.com/tagged/[tag] extensively. but i have tags that i’ve used on thousands of posts, so even if i get all of the posts that use that tag to come up, i’ve got to narrow down the results, which can take a while.
one other thing: if i type url.tumblr.com/search/#[tag1] #[tag2] into the address bar, it doesn’t work; it just redirects to my entire blog. what does work is url.tumblr.com/search/%23[tag1] %23[tag2]. so if i wanted to type the example in the previous reblog (https://silveth.tumblr.com/search/#monkey island #fanfic) into my address bar instead of clicking on the link, i would have to type in https://silveth.tumblr.com/search/%23monkey island %23fanfic. just a note for anyone who, like me, immediately tries to use that structure with different tags and/or a different blog.
