Are you using Spotlight? Do you know what Spotlight is?
If you’re running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or higher on your Macintosh, you should really get to know this feature.
If you’re running OSX 10.4 (Tiger) Spotlight is kinda slow and clunky in nature, but this tip will still help you out so read on…
Spotlight is an incredible search engine, capable of swiftly locating files based on file name or file type. Spotlight will deliver search results from your local computer, or across multiple computers living on your home or office network.
You can find out more about your Spotlight feature and learn some innovative ways to employ it HERE.
As great as Spotlight is, it could be even better, and here’s how I’ve improved my own Spotlight experience. Let’s speed it up.
The downside of Spotlight searches, especially advanced searches, is that Spotlight will search through every single file on your computer whenever you initiate a new search. In order to cut down on the time it takes Spotlight to return a search result, I’ve added items to Spotlight’s “Privacy” category, in other words, I’ve told Spotlight to ignore and exclude certain areas of my computer from it’s searches.
Here’s how:
1. Go to the Black Apple at the top left of your screen. Choose System Preferences.
2. Click on the Spotlight icon (top row, farthest right).
3. Click on the Privacy tab, and then click on the + button at the bottom to add items to the privacy (ignored) list.
4. From the resulting window, select your main Hard Drive in the left-hand sidebar, select your System folder, and hit Choose.
This will prevent Spotlight from including in its searches thousands of system files and images that aren’t really meant to be accessed or viewed by humans. Let’s do some more.
5. Press the + button again, and navigate to your Hard Drive, and then Library folder, hit Choose again.
6. Okay, press the + button again, and this time navigate to your home folder (mine is called “foleypod”) and choose that Library folder too.
NOTE: if you want Spotlight to include email messages in its normal search results, skip step #6.
This tip is particularly helpful for a couple of reasons.
First, it will speed up Spotlight quite a bit.
Additionally, Apple has included the Spotlight feature into Finder searches. When you open a finder window, and then use any Smart Search options (like the ones already included in your finder sidebar – see photo) you’re using Spotlight.
Your System and Library folders contain thousands of little image files, which your computer requires to draw windows and icons for you. If you do a search for, say, all images, or all images viewed or added yesterday, you will have to sift through lots of images that you don’t really need to be looking at.
If you exclude these folders from Spotlight’s repertoire, your searches will include more of what you’re looking for. Notice in the image below, that my search for “all images” brought up exactly 10,000 items (see the text at the bottom of the finder window.)
Without these folders hidden from Spotlight’s view, the same search brought up more than 300,000 images.
That volume of search results sort of renders the search engine unworkable, doesn’t it?
And now for your next trick…
Using Spotlight as a fast application launcher.
1. Press the command key at the same time as the spacebar. This invokes Spotlight, just as clicking on the Spotlight icon at the top right of the screen will.
2. Type the name of the program you intend to open into the Spotlight search field, and hit enter.
Your program launches, and you didn’t need to go to your Applications folder, or even to your dock. FAST…
Cheers!
~ Chris
