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More tips on limiting Spotlight Searches on your Mac

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Spotlight limiting by date

In the last post, we looked at how to limit Spotlight searches by category using the kind: keyword. But there are several helpful other ways to limit Spotlight searches as well.

Limit by Tag (new in OS X Mavericks)

Use the tag: keyword to limit searches by a specific tag . For example, if I was looking for a file named “skippy” which I had tagged as “critters”, I would use the following search criteria:

skippy tag:critters

Limit by Date

Limiting by date is a feature that I use all the time. Using the date: keyword, you can limit your searches to the following time periods:

  • yesterday
  • today
  • tomorrow
  • last week
  • this week
  • next week
  • this month
  • last month
  • next month
  • this year
  • next year
  • last year

For example, if I was looking for a file named skippy that I created last month, I would use the following search criteria:

skippy date:last month

Of course, the future keywords will only work with calendar appointments and events.

Limit by Metadata

Spotlight also allows you to limit your search by the file’s metadata. For instance, you can use keywords such as author, keyword, title, lastused, width, aperature, focallength, iso, modified, created, and much, much more.

Let’s say that I wanted to find a file named squirrel that was modified between 6/14/2013 and 6/30/2013. I would then use the following criteria:

squirrel modified:6/14/13-6/30/13

You can also use the greater than, equal to and less then operators:

squirrel modified:<=7/2/13

Using Multiple Search Criteria

You can search by multiple search strings using Spotlight. For instance, let’s say that you are searching for a file that has squirrel in the filename, that is a pdf and was created before 1/1/2014. Thus, your search string would read:

squirrel kind:pdf created:<1/1/2014

Using Complete Search Strings

This trick is similar to using an online search engine such as Google or Yahoo!. If I wanted to find a file that had the words Attention Deficit Disorder in the file name, a search would turn up any file with the word attention in its name, deficit in its name and disorder in its name. This is not exactly what we want. So to ensure that only the exact matching string is returned, you use quotations.

“Attention Deficit Disorder” kind:document

Hopefully, you’ll find some of these Spotlight searching tips helpful in your own workflow.

Finding Files on your Mac using Spotlight

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Inevitibably, the day will come when you will forget where you placed a file or folder.  Luckily, Mac OS X includes a powerful tool to help you find lost or hidden items with ease called Spotlight.  Introduced in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, Spotlight technology allows you to find anything on your computer so quickly that it’s amazing and has been greatly improved in Lion.  When Lion was first installed on your Macintosh, it indexed every file on your system.  Any file you add after that is automatically added to the index, allowing for lightning-fast searching.  You can add additional metadata keywords to your files and folders from the Get Info window which will then be added to the Spotlight index.

Spotlight search box

Spotlight supports the following file types (and is constantly adding more):

  • Address Book Contacts
  • Adobe PDF and Photoshop files
  • Applications
  • Calendar Events & To Do’s
  • E-mail
  • Folders
  • HTML files
  • Image files (.jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .png, .bmp)
  • iWork documents (Pages, Numbers & Keynote files)
  • Microsoft Office Documents
  • Plain Text
  • RTF
  • Video & Audio files (.mp3, .aac, .mov)

A Spotlight search can be executed in two main ways – from a Finder Window or from the menu bar on your Desktop.  Using Spotlight from the menu bar is the easiest way to conduct a search.  On the upper-right-hand corner of your screen, is a magnifying glass icon.  Click the icon to display the Spotlight search box or you can press the keystroke combination ⌘  + Spacebar.  Then, click in the search box and type in a character, a word or several words to find an item.

As you type, a menu appears displaying the top 20 matches to what you have thus far typed.  The matches are grouped in categories such as Applications, PDF’s, Documents, Messages, etc.  To see a preview of an item, move your mouse cursor over the item in the results list – a preview of the item will display in a small window to the left of the results list.

Preview Feature in Spotlight

To view an item, click its name in the list or if the desired item appears first in the list, press Return.  To view a list of all matches, click Show All in the menu.

You can even use Spotlight to perform mathematical calculations.  Simply type your calculation in the Spotlight box and the result will usually appear first in the list.  To quickly open an Application from Spotlight, type in the name of the application (Book, PhotoShop, Word, Mail, etc.).  The application will usually display first in the list.  Press Return to launch the item or click it in the list.

Performing a Spotlight search from the Spotlight window will be discussed in another post.

To Find Files using Spotlight

  1. Click the magnifying glass icon on the upper-right hand corner of the Desktop on the menu bar
    Or
    Click in the Search field on upper-right-hand corner of any Finder Window
    Or
    Press the ⌘ + Spacebar keystroke combination.
  2. Type a character, word or group of words for which you want to search.
  3. Click the item in the results list to display it or press Return if the item appears first in the list.
  4. Move your mouse pointer over an item to view it in a separate preview window.
  5. To see a list of all matches, click Show All in the menu.

 

 

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