Revolutionize Your Productivity: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering File Search on MacOS in Minutes!
Are you one of those people who spend hours searching for files on their MacOS? Do you feel overwhelmed by the number of files you have saved, and don’t know where to start looking for something specific? Well, fear not, because this guide will help revolutionize your productivity by teaching you how to master file search on your MacOS in just minutes!
Let’s start by understanding the built-in file search feature on your MacOS. Pressing Command + Space will bring up Spotlight Search, which allows you to search for files on your computer, as well as perform web searches and launch applications. This is a great feature, but it can also be overwhelming if you don’t know how to use it effectively.
The first step to mastering file search on MacOS is to get familiar with Spotlight’s search operators. These are special characters that you can use to refine your search and get more accurate results. For example, using quotes around a phrase will only show results that match the exact phrase. Using a minus sign (-) before a term will exclude it from the search results, and using an asterisk (*) will search for any word that starts with the letters you enter. These are just a few examples, but there are many more operators that you can use to refine your search.
Another way to master file search on MacOS is to customize your searches. By default, Spotlight search will show you results in order of relevance, but you can change this to show results by date or file type. You can also add filters to your searches, such as searching for files in a specific folder, or only searching for files that were modified in the last day.
But what if you need to find a file quickly, without having to go through Spotlight search every time? This is where Alfred comes in. Alfred is a productivity app that allows you to search for files and perform various tasks on your computer quickly and easily. Once you have downloaded Alfred, you can set up custom searches for your most commonly used files, and then access them with just a few keystrokes.
Lastly, a great way to organize your files and make them more searchable is to use tags. Tags are a way of categorizing your files based on their content, allowing you to easily find them later on. You can add tags to your files by right-clicking on them, selecting “Tags,” and then adding as many tags as you want. You can then search for files by tag in Spotlight search, making it easy to find your files based on their content.
In conclusion, mastering file search on MacOS can revolutionize your productivity, saving you time and frustration when trying to find files on your computer. By using search operators, customizing your searches, using productivity apps like Alfred, and adding tags to your files, you can quickly and easily find the files you need, without having to waste time searching through your entire computer. So, start mastering file search on your MacOS today and take control of your productivity!
Searching on your Mac can be a little bit of a pain. The built-in search box for Finder is powerful, but if often searches for way more than you expected. The following are some search techniques for you to improve file search on macOS.
1. Use search operators
When searching in the Finder search box, you can limit your scope by specifying file attributes with certain search operators.
Text operators
The operator is specified like so
The file type can be almost anything, from a word like “document” to an extension like .docx.
Similarly, you can use the date operator to limit your scope to files of a certain date or recency. Using date:today will only search for files from today.
You can further narrow your search by using the created and modified operators which accept an eight-digit date, like so:
Smart operators
We’re not only limited to text-based operators. We can also use a series of smart operators.
First, set a basic search in a Finder window, then click on the “+” button below to add the first operator.
This will automatically set a “Kind” operator, but you can change that by clicking on the first box. For now, we’ll set the Kind to “PDF” so we only see PDF files in our search.
Click the “+” button again to add another operator. This will reveal a different operator. Let’s click the first dropdown and select “Created date.” Now we can limit our search to files created in the last few days.
If you want to search within different categories, click the “kind” or “last opened date” dropdown to reveal other options. These smart operators are extremely powerful and can narrow your search dramatically.
2. Search current folder
By default, Finder will search your entire system when you type in the search box. Set it to default to your current folder instead for more precise searches.
Open Finder’s preferences under the Finder menu.
Click on the “Advanced” tab.
Change the dropdown box to “Search the Current Folder” to limit your searches.
3. Set tags and Spotlight comments on important documents
If you don’t mind putting in a little legwork ahead of time, you can make it easier to find important files in the future. Let’s say you have a variety of documents for your taxes, but they aren’t all in the same folder. If you set one of the built-in color tags to “taxes,” you can search based on that term and find files from anywhere.
Using Tags
Tags can be customized in Finder’s Preferences window under the “Tags” tab. Right-click on a tag and choose “Rename tag…” to apply your own name.
Tight-click on a file and choose the color tag to apply.
Later, you can search by the color or name of those tags.
4. Save searches
If you make the same search regularly, you can save it for later as a saved search, which will appear in the sidebar.
First, search for the terms you want to save in the Finder window, then click the “Save” button underneath the search window.
Make sure that “Add to Sidebar” is checked to keep the search in your sidebar for later.
Expand with other tools
These tips we’ve shown are just for Finder. You can expand your searching power with other tools. EasyFind will search through every file on your system, including system files. Path Finder is a Finder-replacement utility that includes powerful search and filtering tools. Alfred can search by file name instantly, with more power to expand than Spotlight.
Alexander Fox is a tech and science writer based in Philadelphia, PA with one cat, three Macs and more USB cables than he could ever use.
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