While recently responding to readers’ troubles for Mac 911 and researching other stories, I discovered I’d mostly given up on a powerful option for saving recurring searches.The Mac OS file matching criteria are name, size, creation date and time. Click the buttons at the top of the list to specify where you want to search.Apple introduced Smart Folders years ago, but they’re often given short shrift compared to other macOS features. Mac OS X displays the controls that you see here. To locate a file by using the Find controls, follow these steps: With the Finder active, display the Find controls by pressing Command+F (or choose File from the Finder menu and then choose Find).Search by name, text, file extension, tags, date created, file size, resolution, author, etc.To try this yourself, you’d want to hit Command+Spacebar to bring up the Spotlight search in Mac OS X, then use the following search syntax: created: xx/xx/xxxx. Even on searches that match hundreds of thousands of results on my 2014 Mac mini (across both a solid-state drive and external hard drives), Spotlight performance is pretty zippy.Find files by name, text, date, size, extension, and more. For many years, starting with its introduction, Spotlight indexing could be spotty or crash and re-run, and searches weren’t always as comprehensive and accurate as one could hope. In List view, move the pointer over the column name you want to sort by, then click it.This is partly due to Spotlight. Do any of the following: Sort items: In any view, choose View > Show View Options, click the Sort By pop-up menu, then choose the sort order, such as Date Modified or Name.
Search For Files By Date Created Full Spotlight IndexYou can exclude volumes as well as specific folders. Clicking the name in quotes restricts the search to that drive or folder hierarchy regardless of other criteria, and is saved along with the smart folder.With This Mac, you’re tapping the full Spotlight index, which covers every connected volume unless you’ve told macOS otherwise. (This doesn’t occur if you’re in a Finder window that’s already showing a smart folder, like All My Files, a default in macOS.)You can also choose File > New Smart Folder or press Command-Option-spacebar, and macOS brings up an empty Smart Folder in a Finder window.Using either the File menu or keyboard shortcut also lets you scope the search: in the top bar after “Search:” you’ll see This Mac and “Name of thing here.” That name in the quotes is whatever drive or folder you had foremost in a Finder window when invoking the smart folder window. Click the + (plus) sign that appears at the upper right, and it’s turned into a smart folder with a Save button to retain your criteria. If you start typing a search into the Spotlight field in any Finder window, you see results in that window. By default, macOS adds Name, which matches file and folder names, as well as names embedded in certain fields (like email subject lines).The popup field that has Name in it also contains several other items: Last Opened Date, Contents, Created Date, Last Modified Date, File Size, and Kind. Click + and you can add a criterion. Those items contents are removed from the search index.)You can perform freeform searches in a Spotlight field, using Boolean operators that let you combine conditions (like AND, OR, and NOT), but this tutorial focuses on creating folders that you can save and reuse, so we’ll open the hood on how to combine and exclude items in series by setting criteria.When you first open a Smart Folder, only the line beginning with Search appears with a Save and + at the far right. (Use the Spotlight system preference pane’s Privacy tab to either select volumes, folders, and packages after clicking the + sign or drag items in. In other cases, applying the criteria seems to have no effect except to find no matches.Many of the Other criteria have highly specialized uses. In my list, I see one related to a password prompt that’s clearly misplaced. You can also uncheck items you never use.I’ve found that some criteria make no sense being there. If you use any of these frequently, you can check the In Menu box for the line on which it’s described. Thus, searching for fleishman using Matches finds files with names that contain Glenn Fleishman but also GlennFleishman (intercap F) but not glennfleishman (no cap F). In fact, I had to perform a number of exclusive tests to figure out the difference, because Spotlight marks “words” very broadly. Contains matches against text that also appears within word boundariesThe Matches and Contains filters are often very, very close. Matches finds the start of a word in text The difference between Matches, Contains, and Is (and the logically reversed Is Not) is as follows: For text, you see Matches, Contains, Begins With, Ends With, Is, and Is Not. Hold down the Option key and click … on the Name line. Create a new smart folder ( File > New Smart Folder). You can stick an All as a sub-query within an Any, which an example would help better explain. The All option is included even though AND is the default for top-level criteria, because you can nest groupings. For example, you might want to find all images except BMP files. For the second sub-groupings, set it to “Contents contains TPS reports.”The schematic description of that would be “kind is PDF AND name contains TPS reports OR contents of any file contain TPS Reports.”A more complicated query lets you combine conditions that must be true with optional ones to produce a single search.You can also use None as a powerful way to exclude items. For the first sub-grouping, add a criteria and set the first to “Kind is PDF” and “Name contains TPS reports.” Change both sub-groupings from Any to All. Leave Any alone and Option-click to its right twice to create two sub groupings. Another way to access these settings is to open the View Options floating window: press Command-J, choose View > Show View Options, or Control-click on a window and select Show View Options. These let you groups results in ways that help a lot with searches.You can toggle between them by holding down the Option key while selecting or after selecting the View menu or, in a Finder window, the action (gear) menu or the Change the Item Arrangements By menu (if you’ve added that to the default toolbar). As with regular Finder windows, you have both Arrange By and Sort By. How make icon for mac desktop shortcutFor example, you can Arrange By Size and Sort By Date Last Opened, and all the files are grouped in ranges, like 100MB to 1GB, 1MB to 10MB, and so forth, and then sorted by last opened date within that.I often like to Arrange By a date parameter, like Date Added, as this works for downloaded files that might have a separate creation and modification date that’s preserved, but your interest is when it was added to your computer. However, when you select a sort condition from it, the Finder creates relevant headings, like years or sizes.
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