Chapter 3. Searching with Spotlight
IN THIS CHAPTER
What Spotlight can do for you
Spotlight behind the scenes—metadata and the Spotlight Store
Searching deep within your files with Spotlight
Mac OS X includes a powerful tool to help you search through the information on your Mac: Spotlight technology. Spotlight is a revolutionary new technology that helps you find files and folders quickly and accurately, using a variety of methods and criteria.
Searching with Spotlight can be extremely simple or very sophisticated. For example, Spotlight can simply search for a file by its name, or it can search for combinations of other attributes, such as the file's size, creator, modification date, or label color. Better still, Spotlight can search for dozens of even more specific and complex characteristics, such as for text that is embedded in a PDF or Word document, or the exposure settings for a picture imported from your digital camera. In Leopard, you can even use Boolean logic or enter a specific date range.
What Spotlight Can Do for You
No matter how carefully you organize your folders and disks, the time will inevitably arrive when you cannot locate an application, file, or folder without the frustrating task of having to shuffle through hundreds of them to find the one you need. It might also come to pass that your search criteria isn't something you can invoke simply by manually picking through your files in the Finder. What happens if you want to search through thousands of Word documents ...
Get Mac OS® X Leopard™ Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
