12. Find an Item  SEE ALSO 14 Create a Smart Folder That Contains Certain Types of Items 16 Make an Alias (Shortcut)
12. Find an Item 
The Macintosh Operating System has always excelled at finding your stuff; after all, they don't call its navigation system the Finder for nothing. In Mac OS X Tiger, however, Apple has brought searching technology to a whole new level, with a feature called Spotlight . This technology is a database subsystem overlaid upon the filesystem, invisibly , that constantly indexes every new item added to the computer on the basis of kind, creator, last-opened date, and a litany of other criteria. Whereas the Finder in previous versions of the operating system only allowed you to search the names of files looking for a match to a text string you typed in, Spotlight expands this functionality to allow you to search documents' contents, authors, comments, media-specific attributes, and just about any other associated pieces of data. Furthermore, Spotlight is integrated into the Finder, as well as into applications such as Mail and Address Book. Within the Finder, you can create create sophisticated "canned" searches based on detailed query criteria, and save the results of those queries into what are known as Smart Folders , as you will see in 14 Create a Smart Folder That Contains Certain Types of Items . | 1. | Open the Spotlight Search Bar Click the magnifying-glass icon at the far right end of the Mac OS X title bar. The Spotlight search bar appears, prompting you for text terms on which to search. NOTE If this is your first time using Mac OS X Tiger, Spotlight has to index your entire disk (or disks) before making its contents available for searches. Opening the Spotlight search bar during this process tells you how long it will take before it's ready (usually no more than an hour or two, for disks with a lot of data). | | 2. | Enter Your Search Terms Type a word (or a few words) of text that matches the name of a document you're looking for, the author, or the document's contents. As you type, a list of matching items immediately expands below the Spotlight bar. These results are grouped by kind: first the "top hit," or the item in which your search terms matched most closely or frequently; then Chats in which the terms appeared, text or Word documents, folders whose names matched, HTML (web) documents, and so on alphabetically . Only a few results are showntwo or three per category. If you see the result you want in this listing, simply click its title in the list, and it will open in its designated opener application. If the file has no application associated with it, see 7 Assign an Opener Application to a File .  TIP The Spotlight pane of System Preferences allows you to define what kinds of data Spotlight should index, as well as what disks and volumes should be included in searches and what users of the system should have access to search results. Make sure to visit this pane if you have sensitive information on your computer that you don't want other users seeing, or if you want to shorten the time it takes Spotlight to become ready to use by excluding certain volumes from indexing. The Spotlight settings defined by an administrator apply to all users of the system. | | 3. | Browse All Matching Items Chances are that there won't just be one or two matches to your search termsthere'll be hundreds. Click the topmost item in the Spotlight results menu, Show All , to reveal a new application window with detailed and navigable results of everything that matches your search terms. This full-featured Spotlight window lets you select how the results are grouped: by Kind, Date (the time each item was last opened), People (authors and artists , according to how each kind of document defines them), or a flat list of all matching items regardless of category, sorted by date of last access. TIP Use the Sort Within Group by links to choose how items are sorted within a category. You can also use the When links to filter out files that haven't been accessed within the past day, past week, or other time periods, or the Where links to confine the search to a particular disk or area of the system. Within a category, several options are available for revealing more information about the items that Spotlight returned. Click the i icon next to any item to show detailed information about it. Each category by default shows only the top five matches (sorted by the date of last access), and you can click a link at the bottom of each category to see all the matching items of that type. In some categories, such as Images and Movies , you can choose between List or Icon view modes to see larger previews of each item. Movie files can even be played right in this window, just as Music files can be played in their expanded Info panes. When you've located the item you're looking for, double-click it to open it in its designated opener application. | | 4. | Search Within the Finder The Spotlight search mechanism is great for quickly finding an item with textual characteristics that you can match by typing search terms. However, Spotlight integrated with the Finder presents an even more powerful way to search. What if you wanted to craft a very specific search query for, say, image (picture) files created within the last two weeks, with size greater than one megabyte, and with dimensions greater than 1000 pixels wide? With the Spotlight database working its magic, you can. Choose File, Find or press  while in the Finder. A new Finder window appears, with its document pane in New Search mode. | | 5. | Select the Searching Scope Use the names at the top of the window to define where you want the Finder to look for your items. The Servers option searches any network volumes currently mounted, Computer uses all available disks and volumes in the computer, and Home confines the search to the folder hierarchy within your Home folder. You can add more searching scopes using the Others button. NOTE Because Spotlight operates by creating a local index of the contents of all volumes mounted on the computer, every time you mount a new network volume, you must wait for Spotlight to index it before its contents are available for instant searches. | | 6. | Add Search Criteria
The Finder's search mode allows you to specify as many different searching criteria as you want; all the criteria must apply for the results to match. For instance, you can search for items whose filename contains art , whose filename begins with A , whose kind is audio , and whose last-modified date is after last Christmas. You make room for new criteria by clicking the + icon after any criterion line; then use the drop-down menus to define what kind of criteria they are and what sort of comparisons to use. Use the icon on any criterion line to delete that criterion.
The criteria in the first drop-down menu aren't the only ones you have to work with. Select Other from the menu; a sheet appears with a long list of specialized search attributes that apply only to certain kinds of data, such as the aperture size for photos, the authors of a text document, the headline of a news item from the Web, or the pixel width and height of image files. Select one of these attributes and click OK to add it to your search criteria. If you click Add to Favorites , the attribute will be added to the drop-down menu for easy access later.
| | 7. | Enter Search Terms
Optionally, enter text in the Search bar in the Finder's toolbar (next to the magnifying glass). This text is added to the search criteriaall results must match the entered terms as well as whatever criteria you've set up so far.
| | 8. | Explore the Search Results As you add search criteria, the results are shown in real-time in the Finder window, organized as in the Spotlight results window. You can click the i icon next to any item to view detailed information about it, as well as a More Info button, which reveals the item's Info pane. You can list certain kinds of files in the interactive Icon view. Click any item in the list, and its location on the disk is shown in a path listing at the bottom of the window. You can see the series of folders (in a horizontal layout) you'll have to navigate through to get to the item, or double-click any one of the listed folders to go to that folder's Finder window. TIP While building your search, use the Finder's View , Show View Options command to select how items should be sorted within the results listing. Note that the third view mode selector button has changed from Column view to a new icon indicating Grouped view, the view you use when browsing Spotlight search results. You can double-click a file anywhere in the search results window to launch it in its opener application. You can also drag any listed item from the results window to the Desktop or another Finder window to copy it, or hold down  while dragging to move it. |  |
