  Ellerman bombs are transient brightenings in the wings of H-alpha 6563 {\AA}
that pinpoint photospheric sites of magnetic reconnection in solar active
regions. Their partial visibility in the 1600 {\AA} and 1700 {\AA} continua
registered routinely by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the
Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) offers a unique opportunity to inventory such
magnetic-field disruptions throughout the AIA database if a reliable recipe for
their detection can be formulated. This is done here. We improve and apply an
H-alpha Ellerman bomb detection code to ten data sets spanning viewing angles
from solar disc centre to the limb. They combine high-quality H-alpha imaging
spectroscopy from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope with simultaneous AIA imaging
around 1600 {\AA} and 1700 {\AA}. A trial grid of brightness, lifetime and area
constraints is imposed on the AIA images to define optimal recovery of the 1735
Ellerman bombs detected in H-alpha. The best results when optimising
simultaneously for recovery fraction and reliability are obtained from 1700
{\AA} images by requiring 5-sigma brightening above the average 1700 {\AA}
nearby quiet-Sun intensity, lifetime above one minute, area of 1-18 AIA pixels.
With this recipe 27% of the AIA detections are H-alpha-detected Ellerman bombs
while it recovers 19% of these (of which many are smaller than the AIA
resolution). Better yet, among the top 10% AIA 1700 {\AA} detections selected
with combined brightness, lifetime and area thresholds as many as 80% are
H-alpha Ellerman bombs. Automated selection of the best 1700 {\AA} candidates
therefore opens the entire AIA database for detecting most of the more
significant photospheric reconnection events. This proxy is applicable as
flux-dynamics tell-tale in studying any Earth-side solar active region since
early 2010 up to the present.
