spotlight front end

Last time I went over finder, I talked about how to use the command line. This time I will breeze through the GUI. Using spotlight through the menu bar, or on the side of finder will not allow you to take advantage of only searching in one kind of meta data. These tools only allow you to search for a string anywhere in the document. File name, file type; anything!

For power users, spotlight is not for finding lost documents, it's for creating abstract groupings of files. First, try the search in finder. This is not the same as the search in the menu bar, because in finder, you can specify a path. Either the folder you are looking at in that window, home directory, hole hard drive, or all local drives. To the right is another option to search some other path if you need it.

This is nice, but not always enough. For me, being in graphic design, I search for images of a certain file type and suffix on the name, done within one pay period, placed in my working folder. While all the images themselves are in sub-folders I can search the main folder for something special using command-f, or the plus icon all the way to the right, past others. This allows you to search using all the power of meta data. Under attribute, select other. It may take a second or two for the window to pop up. At the bottom of the window is a check box to add that attribute to favorites. Now, let's say you chose Duration greater than 3 minutes. Now you want to add the attribute songs from the iTunes store. Click the plus icon, choose the attribute kind. The kind you want is not in the sub menu, so click on "Others..." This list of other file types takes for ever to load, once it does, protected iTunes songs are called MPEG-4 Audio File (protected).

Finding the right kind type is hard. If you know a file that is of the kind you are looking for run it through the command line tool mdls to find the line marked kMDItemKind. If that is a little to specific for you follow kMDItemContentTypeTree till you find the right item for you. Then, since the GUI does not have an entry for content type tree, use Raw query, then type in kMDItemContentTypeTree = "whatever.you.want.here". Once your search is complete, you may want to save it. Because, in my opinion, the GUI is so slow, you may want to make an further changes to the search with a text editor. The saved search is a standard xml document, the search is a standard search string like using mdfind.

I hope that helped, and happy searching!