92 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
WORKINGMAC SPOTLIGHT TIPS AND TRICKSmay have never learned.
MORE TO THE SEARCH BAR
Spotlight is a search engine that runs on
your Mac. In the background, the Spotlight
metadata engine is scanning new and
changed files on your computer—and it’s
not just looking for the names of your files,
but is cataloging information about their
contents. Spotlight indexes the text of
every document it can find, and knows
details about the compression formats of
video files, the focal length of a digital
photo, and much more.
The most common ways to search an
entire Mac with Spotlight are either
through the menu bar item (go.macworld.
com/spmn)—the magnifying glass, which
you can activate by typing Command-
Space—or by searching in a Finder
window. If you keep it simple, just typing
the name of the file or app you’re looking
for, Spotlight will give you want. In recent
years Apple has worked to speed up the
initial Spotlight search results so it’s easy
to use Spotlight to quickly launch pretty
much any app on your Mac (go.macworld.
com/look).
But there’s a lot more you can do with
Spotlight (go.macworld.com/m0re). You
can type words or phrases from inside
documents, and it’ll find them. To find
exact phrases, add quotation marks
around them. You can even use NOT and
OR (in capital letters) to limit searches.
One of my most common searches is
to search for an image with a specific
phrase in its name. This is relatively easy
to do in the Finder, via the Find command
(Command-F). As you start typing a phrase
in a Finder window’s search box, a drop-
down menu will suggest options to apply
to your query. I’ll type a search
term like logo and the menu will
suggest “Name matches: logo”. By
selecting that option, I’m kicking
off a search for files with the word
“logo” in the name. But I’m not
done. Once I’ve selected that
search term, I type the word
“image,” and the Finder offers up
several different filters—all images
or specific image formats. I
choose Kinds: Image from the
drop-down menu, and all of aYou can generate complex search queries quickly from
a Finder window.