There should be a more intuitive option to search for local files only, excluding results from shared media repository.
Current option (the 'local:' prefix) was added in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/140567/ (T63061: CirrusSearch: Add advanced search option to only search local files)
See also:
*T32239: Allow searching of only local hosted files
*T67459: Allow option for omitting results from a repository when searching for files
It's perhaps not the best documented feature, but you can add local: to the query string, compare:
Only enwiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&fulltext=1&search=local%3A+purple+flowers
enwiki and commons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&fulltext=1&search=purple+flowers
Does this work for your use case? Note that local: has to be the first term of the search query.
@EBernhardson, yep, it works. I just read about this feature in another phab ticket.
But probably there should be a more intuitive option: some checkbox or other kind of switcher.
There are 4 Wikipedias with over 100k of local files (en.wiki has more than 800k) and other ~30 Wikipedias with more than 10k files each and we have only this well-hidden prefix about that people don't know probably.