How to Limit Spotlight Searches on your Mac

Many people I know who use Macs tell me that they rarely use the Spotlight feature or forget all about it. I personally find Spotlight to be an enormous time-saving feature. One complaint that I’ve heard is that when searching for something, Spotlight delivers too many results. That’s probably because they aren’t limiting their Spotlight search to a specific category.

Limiting Spotlight by Kind

One of the powerful abilities of Spotlight is its ability to confine your search to specific categories such as images, folders, email, music files, pdfs and more. Let’s say that you are searching on your computer for an image that had squirrel in the name. To limit your search only to image files, use the code: kind:image.

In this case, our search criteria would be:

Squirrel kind:image

If I wanted to find spreadsheet named “renew” I would use the term:

renew kind:spreadsheet

What’s nice about the above example, is that the search results will include both Numbers and Excel spreadsheets, which can come in handy if you can’t remember with which application you created the file.

Below are some common categories you can use with the keyword kind: to get you started:

To Limit Spotlight Searches by Kind:

kind:app (to find an application)
kind:application (to find an application)
kind:movie (to find a movie file)
kind:music (to find a music file)
kind:image (to find an image file)
kind:photoshop (to find a photoshop .psd file)
kind:jpeg (to find a .jpg file)
kind:devonthink (to find a DevonThink database file)
kind:scrivener (to find a Scrivener file)
kind:pdf (to find a PDF file)
kind:presentation (to find a presentation file – Keynote, PowerPoint)
kind:spreadsheet (to find a spreadsheet file – Excel, Numbers)
kind:Numbers (to find a Numbers file)
kind:Pages (to find a Pages file)
kind:Keynote (to find a Keynote file)
kind:Word (to find a Microsoft Word file)
kind:Excel (to find an Excel file)
kind:PowerPoint (to find a Microsoft PowerPoint file)
kind:bookmark (to find a Safari bookmark)
kind:event (to find a Calendar appointment)
kind:todo (to find a Calendar task)
kind:email (to find an email message)
kind:audio (to find an audio file)
kind:folder (to find a folder or a disk)