Possible to search for photos via time?

Question

I do not see this option; date, yes, but not time. I'd like to search, say for all pics shot at 12:37. Putting that in the search box gets no results, though there are pictures with that time. (I do know I can change the View choice, from Alpha by title to view by date.)
Why would I want this? We go on wildflower walks and shoot hundreds of photos, perhaps dozens of species. Sometimes it's hard to know if Picture A & B, depicting very similar plants & flowers, actually show the same species. (We're still beginners at this, and some families like the penstemons and paintbrushes have lots of very similar species). So I use time as a helper. If they were shot within a couple of minutes, probably they are of the same plant.
My new technique is to shoot a "spacer photo" when I switch plants, which helps to separate "bouts" of photography. But previous outings don't have these.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Right, now I see how it works for you.
Just temporarily switching the event sort to Sort By Date while you do all your initial titles is probably the simplest improvement to make in your workflow, and sounds like it would eliminate some hassle.
But I'll tell you how I would do it, just because workflows interest me and you say you are thinking about it.
Each wildflower walk is an Event. Keep your events sorted by Date/Time as you process and sort photos. Retitle as desired.
Create a smart album to actually show off and browse your wildflowers--perhaps based on Keyword is Wildflower. Easy enough to apply the Wildflower keyword to an entire event each time you download photos and un-apply it from the occasional people shots as you process. The Wildflowers smart album can be sorted by title so that you can group all the same flowers from multiple places, rate the best shots of that flower, etc.
Of course, that approach separates most browsing and rating from the initial sorting process--this helps me because I tend to bog down on the rating part, but might feel weird to others.
(I also name the Event with a precise location--eg, Crater Lake Wildflower Meadow--and then use Photos>Batch Change to put that same info into the Description. Then it's easy enough in the combined smart album to say "okay, where did I take that shot?" and check the Description. However, Places might serve that need more efficiently. Sometimes I use the overall Event Description for a sort of diary entry--"third trip to this garden, after a rainy March had the best flowers")
I never use the Title field and use Description a lot, but in this case, I'd say using Title instead of Description would be really annoying because I think you'd have to use the mouse to get to the description field every single time, instead of just being able to tab and type across photos, and you'd have to keep looking down to see if you already labeled the photo or not instead of that being right in your face. Photos>Batch Change would let you change a bunch at a time, but that's probably still slower. I tend to use Description for big general info like place and would think Title is more appropriate for very photo-specific info like flower names.
Although, using Keyword instead of Title might be an idea. With the long Latin names which I presume are a hassle to type, being able to just click or apply pre-entered names with a shortcut could be good, and iPhoto will auto-fill Keywords but I don't think it auto-fills repeated Titles? Keyword Manager is a third-party utility, I don't use it myself but Terence recommends it as excellent. If you are seeing the same flowers over and over again, keywords might make life easier, and if you frequently have variations on species--eg Poppies (California), Poppies (Opium), Poppies (I've exhausted my knowledge of flowers)---then Keyword Manager handles nested keywords and I think it would automatically let you really quickly browse ALL your poppies and then each type of poppy. Might be worth checking--there should be a free trial. A keyword approach would also eliminate the possible problem where you have multiple flowers in one sort, but Sort by Title misses the flowers that aren't first (although Title-based Smart Albums would also eliminate that problem).
One of the other things to consider there is what you intend to do with the photos, though--various forms of printing/publishing to web have varying support for automatically including the Title, etc. So if you know what you'd like to do with the pictures--slideshow? photo book?--it's worth playing around to see what the export options and integration are like before you process your backlog.
An interesting challenge! Have fun.