Mac Tricks And Tips » Spotlight

Rebuild / Delete Spotlight Index

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:34:59 +0000

Hey,

Every so often you may need to delete the spotlight index or rebuild it. There may be a variety of reasons, for example if you clone your hard drive and spotlight isn’t picking up every file or folder, or you believe that you can’t find the file you want when you do a spotlight search. Rebuilding the index is simple, and it doesn’t take long for spotlight to be up and running again.

To rebuild your index open up System Preferences > Spotlight. Then open up the privacy tab. Normally you would place files or folders in this area that you don’t want to be indexed. To rebuild the index drop your hard drive from Finder into this window.

Anything can be placed into the drop area of spotlight privacy.

Repeat this for as many hard drive you have or want to re-index. Once you have done this, select the drive and press the minus button from the bottom of the list. This will delete the delete the hard drive from the privacy options and force spotlight to remove and start re-building the index.

The re-indexing will start a second or two after you delete the hard drive from the list. It will then proceed to rebuild the index. Depending on how many files you have it may take a while to update.

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Turning Off Spotlight

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:57:13 +0000

Hey

Some people are not a fan of using Spotlight. I personally think its one of the best search programs out there for your Mac. If you do want to turn it off, its pretty simple. There are two methods, easy and hard. The easy methods doesn’t really turn it off but cripples it so much that it doesn’t index anything and it doesn’t run. The harder method actually removes key files to stop spotlight from running.

The Easy Method

The easy method involves setting up Spotlight so it doesn’t index anything. All though the app is not off, it is not set to run on anything, so you do save on the CPU cycles when a new file is created or a file is modified. To disable this feature go to System Preferences > Spotlight >Privacy. In this tab add all of you hard drives to the window. This will delete any spotlight index and stop it from indexing files and folders.

As I mentioned before, this doesn’t turn Spotlight off as the daemon will still run and take up some memory. However it wont run any CPU cycles and the memory it consumes will be very little.

The Harder Method

The harder method isn’t really that hard, it just involves you having to navigate to a deep folder and having to delete a file. If you do this method it can be hard to switch Spotlight back on as you do move or delete the actual files Spotlight uses to start its process. To do this method (which will really switch Spotlight off) delete, better yet move, the following files:

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

You will have to reboot for the changes to take effect. I personally don’t recommend using this method, rather use the easy method.

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Terminal Tips For Spotlight

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:17:10 +0000

Hey

While browsing the webs in the small moments of free time I actually have I came across a really interesting post about using Terminal tips for improving spotlight. You can find the post over at Mac Tips, I recommend you give it a good read. I wish I had thought of some of the tips on the site. While I am here I would like to point out one Terminal tip that you should find useful.

If you are building scripts, apps or pretty much anything with Terminal, you may want to to search your Spotlight database to find a specific file or folder. This is really easy to do. Simply type:

mdfind

and then append at the end of the line the word or phrase you want to search for. If you have a multi word phrase make sure you surround it in double quotes or speech marks ( ” ” ).

The mdfind tool is a little broad, entering anything into the query section will bring back hundreds of results. You can easily cut it down. Simply add the following to restrict where it will look for files:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents

Again add a search word to the end of the phrase.

One cool little add on to this command is to add “-count” before the phrase you want to search for. This will not bring back any results but it will give you a number for the number of results. For instance if you search for “james” it will return a number of the number of documents containing the phrase “james”.

One of my favourite commands is the “-live” command which you can add to the string. This will give you a live update on the number of files and phrases. For every new file with your phrase it will add it to the list. For instance

mdfind -count -live -onlyin ~/Downloads "file name"

will give you a running total of the number of files the “file name” as the search query in the downloads folder. An interesting way of keeping track of files and folders in your downloads folder. You could combine something like this with Geektool to have interesting update on the number of files on your hard drive.

If you want to find out more information on how to use this Terminal tip check out the man page. If you have any interesting tips or tricks for this command, please leave a comment below.

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Search System Folders With Spotlight

admin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:30:57 +0000

Hey

Normally when you do a search in Finder and you use Spotlight, files in system folders folders will be hidden. This is due to the fact that most of the files you never need to modify, see or use. But every so often you may want to find a file or folder which is a system file. The process is rather simple, but as usual hidden away, where you would normally never find it. The idea and most of the steps to this post came from Dale, after I had ran out of ideas yesterday and posted for help on Twitter.

To search system files and folders, open a new Finder window and press Control + F. This will bring up a small “advance” search bar along the top. Where the bar says “Kind” click on it and select other. Notice the system file option already present in the screen shot, that is where we will be heading.

The menu that pops up gives use hundreds of options that we can use to narrow down our searches. If you use the conveniently places search box in the top right and search for “system”, no quotes, you will get the option we want. Simply select the check box on the right that says “In Menu” and press OK.

From the drop down menu again, (where Kind is placed), select system files. In the second box select include. You can now use the main search field in the top right corner to search for files as you would normally.

There are some caveats to this system. For example, it does still search for normal files. So you can’t exclude them, as a result you do get hundreds more results. As well as this it doesn’t work from the Spotlight icon on the right of the menu bar. You still have to use Finder. But for a simple work around it does work pretty well and can really help if you are searching for system files.

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Narrow Down Spotlight Searches Part 2

admin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Hey

Quite a while ago I did a post about narrowing down searches using the kind: operator. I have been looking and testing out different operators that help you narrow down searches but with different operators. They are really simple and help out a lot if you end up with humongous search results. Remember that the operators you use don’t have any spaces for example you use kind:image. That will then search for images. If you want to search within images you add a space after. If you have more than one word use speech marks “”.

1) Name:

Kind of obvious searches the name of the file. If you have a file name with more than one word put it in speech marks. For example name:”Task Number One”

2) Author:

Searches for authors of documents. Will only work if you have programs that give assign author such as Word, Mail, iChat, Excel etc. For example author:James

3) Date:

Searches for the date of a file. You know when a file was made you can search within a date. For example date:today date:yesterday date:tomorrow (for ical events) as well as date.

4) Created:

Similar to the date but finds a file when he was created. For example created:14/04/08

5) Kind:

As mentioned in the previous post this finds files of a specified type. E.g kind:image

Although this post is a bit short it does high light some cool ways to find files with spotlight. I will post again when I find more.

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Narrow Down Spotlight Searches

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:02:00 +0000

Hey

The problem with find is that some times it is “too good”. If there is such a thing. As a result if you want to search for something simple, for example the search term “red”. It will find every single file and folder that has the word red in it. This is all well as good, but most of the time you end up with thousands of results, and you spend the next ten minutes scrolling down the list until you reach the place you want. But there is a quicker way, hence the post, to narrow down the searches for a specific file or folder type. This means that if you have a file that you know is an image you can show only the image files. It is super easy, and only requires a bit more typing.

If you open up a new Finder window (or from the menu bar). An enter into the search box:

kind:

You can now begin to narrow down your search. As you are typing lots of files and folders will pop up in the search box but you can just ignore them. Once you you have typed in the text above you can then specify a type of file you want to narrow down. For example if you want to show just images you can type “images”, music files “music”. You can even narrow this down further by typing in the type of music file, “wav” for example.

What will happen is that the search result will remove anything that isn’t that kind of file. Leaving you with a clearer view of your search result. If you want to know what kind of file a file is. Open a Finder window, scroll all the way down the the bottom, so you don’t click on any files. Right Click in an empty space, go to Show View Option and then tick the Kind check box from the list. This will then, in Finder, show the type of file you have.

You can then use these keywords in the search parameters. If you want to search with a kind, put a space after your filter keyword and then type you search term. This will then search for your keyword in only the kind you have specified. For example, on my computer the search term “red” returned more the 10,000 items. But the search term “kind:folder red” returned 6, which is a lot easier to pick the folder I want.

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Using Spotlight For Quick Calculations

admin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 17:23:00 +0000

Hey

Whats 25*253? Its a hard sum to do (the answer is 6325). Calculator is usually the only way to work out such a sum with out being a maths genius. But spotlight has a cool little feature than enables you to do basic calculations.

The idea behind this tip is that you insert you sum into the spotlight box in the menu bar your computer whirs away and the result is outputted at the top of the list along with any applicable results.

You can do most basic math functions plus, minus, times, divide as well as square root ( sqrt (number) ), indicies you can’t do.

Its a very cool little trick and is great for those quick sums. It quickly bring up spotlight press command + space.

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