Do Spotlight Comments Work on Folders?

I noticed something that may just be a quirk. I've found that I can do a Spotlight search and find folders by name but I cannot find a folder by searching for a term that I've put into Spotlight comments for that folder. I seem to be able to find other files just fine by searching for Spotlight comments I've put on them, just not folders. Is this the way Spotlight works or am I just running into a strange quirk? Thanks.
Regards,
Steve M.

Strange. My Spotlight comments are still on the folder as originally enterred and Spotlight hasn't been able to find it using the comments as the search term/terms. It does find the folder when I search for the folder by its actual name.
Thanks,
Steve M.

Similar Messages

Automator 2-Add Spotlight Comments still dead?

After the latest update, I was hoping that this Action would have been fixed. When creating a Workflow, adding Spotlight Comments works fine. However, save as a plugin or application and its dead.
Is it me, or is this still a bug after the latest update?

I use this more than any other Action because my entire Archive is rooted in the Spotlight reference process.
I was given a possibility in another post to not use "Get Selected Finder Items" and then it would work. Which, to me, is counter to proper usage, especially in regard to how it worked in Automator 1. So I am considering this a "bug" in Automator until they fix it.

Add Spotlight Comment from file?

As I understand the way the *Add Spotlight Comments* works, the input is the file (or set of files) to be modified, and the added comments can either come statically from the workflow, or as user input if the workflow permits *Show Action When Run*.
I have a moderately ugly shell script that downloads and examines a succession of files and builds a description (just a few dozen words) that I want to add automatically to those comments. At the end of my script, I've downloaded the file, and stored the comments I want in a separate temp file.
As far as I can see, Automator can't do this: I can't specify a file as the incoming source of those new Spotlight Comments, can I?
Assuming the answer is negative, two quick non-Automator followups:
1) Is there any shell-script level Unix command that can manipulate the comments (without trying to hack into the .DS_Store files, that is).
2) Can Applescript do this? And, crucially, where's the best current help for Applescript for someone that hasn't touched it in many years?

Automator can do it, although some of the actions may not be obvious. Text (for example, the results of your ugly shell script) can be placed into a variable for later use, but you can also get it from a file. If your description/comment is in a plain text file, you can use the Combine Text Files action to get the text, then place it in a variable that can be used with the Set Spotlight Comments for Finder Items action.
Example:
1) Get Specified Finder Items (add your description file) (ignore input)
2) Combine Text Files
3) Set Value of Variable {Variable: whatever}
4) Get Specified Finder Items (add the file you want to comment) (ignore input)
5) Set Spotlight Comments for Finder Items {drag variable whatever to the text field, Append to existing comments}

Spotlight Comment Missing, But Smart Folders Still Work

I have entered a lot of spotlight comments on files. On about several 100 off them, Apple Command i does not show any spotlight comments. Its not likely that I erased or failed to "save" several 100, say about 600 out of 900 files. I know for a fact that I entered spotlight comments on nearly all of my photo files. For some reason, the smart folders that look for spotlight comments still return the files.
I shut down and rebooted. Still no change. For some reason, I cannot find the way to edit the search criteria in smart folders.
Any ideas?

Well, this is proving to be a tough case. I rebooted with Option, Command P and R, and then rebooted in safe mode and ran disk utility, both verify permissions and check volume on both the upper level drive (the one that has a technical name) and the named volume (the one that has a user-assigned name). I hate to say this, but nothing has changed. <darn>.
I am kind of thinking about paying Apple to furnish and install an upgrade to my OS from 10.4 to 10.6 but am reluctant because of persistent reports that the newer OS has driver problems with Epson photo printers, and other issues with Adobe LightRoom which is a critical app for me.
I did search the forum to see if anybody else has the same kind of problem but did not find anything. It generous of you to offer your expertise, so I hate to keep coming back.
Anyway, is there another approach that I could look into?
Thanks!

Smart Folders, Spotlight comments and Apple mail messages

Hi,
I have a simple question, but couldn't figure it out yet:
I have a workflow that tags specific mail messages according to the specific mail inbox folders I assign them to (be it via incoming rules, or Act-On rules) by automatically adding specific Spotlight comments.
My mail messages, therefore, have text in their comment boxes (if you check via GetInfo).
When I use Spotlight, I can find mail messages by searching for the comments - this is exactly as expected.
I however also have smart folders (searching for a specific Spotlight comment) that list other files that I tag with the same Spotlight comments - but my Smart Folders never find the mail messages with the requested tags (at most they find the folder that contains the messages if this folder is tagged - which it is generally not).
Question: how can I make sure that the Smart Folder does indeed identify and list the mail messages that I have tagged via Spotlight comment ?
Thanks a lot !
D.V.
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Howdy,
I cannot reproduce this problem myself...I see the same results in both the Mail spotlight and the spotlight menu bar item. I'm not sure if after installing 10.5 a new spotlight index is created, but it might be worth a shot to create a fresh index and see if that helps.
I haven't tried this, but it was the easy way I could find to reindex.
Open Spotlight Preferences
In the privacy tab, add the volume you want to reindex
After a few moments, remove that volume from the privacy list
Allow Spotlight to reindex the volume
Please let me know if that works for reindexing.
+R

How to copy a files name and spotlight comments to a text file for an entire folder

I have movie covers saved as a jpeg for every movie my family and I own. There is about 700 and they each have a comment of the main actors, release dates, and descriptions. This makes it easy to find what to watch. I want my parents to have all of this info but they have a windows laptop so the comments don't transfer with the file and can't be searched like you can on a mac. Is there an applescript, automator, program I can download, or program code supported in xcode that will do at least one of the following things?
1)Take the name of the picture file and spotlight comment, copy and paste it into a text document like word that looks like this...
File Name1- Spotlight Comment for file 1
File Name 2- Spotlight Comment for file 2
. for all 700 files in a folder
2) It would be equally helpful if there was something that would take the name of the picture file and spotlight comment, copy and paste it to a movie file's comments with the same name but obviously has different extention. For an example
In a Pictures folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.jpeg       Comment: (2008) Genre: Action...             <- copy comment
In a Movie Folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.m4v       Comment:                                               <- paste
and do this for all 700 files
3) Is there a free photo program that works on mac and windows that I can put all my movie pictures in and have a description like I did with the comments? It would also need a place that to search the description for keywords. So Basically an itunes for pictures that works on both mac and windows. If so I still need a way to get the spotlight comments to the description.
4) I feel like this would make things more difficult, but if not I can put all of the .m4v files in itunes so instead of pasting all the comments back into a file in finder paste them in a description in itunes
5) At the very least a code that I can run one by one for every file that will paste the comments into the same document
Note: When I say spotlight comments I mean the comment box that is available when you click on get info of a file. The pictures are in the pictures section of finder in a folder called Movie Pictures. The movie files are on an external hard-drive in a file called Movies. Also I am slightly familiar with applescript and automater in that I have used both to create keyboard shortcuts and simple voice commands. I have programmed in c++ and C too. So If you give me a code for applescript I do know what to do with it.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read all of this and extra thanks to anyone who tries to help.

Clendenen02 wrote:
2) It would be equally helpful if there was something that would take the name of the picture file and spotlight comment, copy and paste it to a movie file's comments with the same name but obviously has different extention. For an example
In a Pictures folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.jpeg       Comment: (2008) Genre: Action...             <- copy comment
In a Movie Folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.m4v       Comment:                                               <- paste
and do this for all 700 files
This Bash script will do it.
Edit "PicDir" and "MovDir" to the location of your Folders
(Note: The comment is written to the m4v file using xattr, so the Spotlight comment field appears blank in Finder, but the comment metadata is still indexed by Spotlight (If you add a Spotlight comment from Finder, it is stored both as an extended attribute and in a .DS_Store file)
#!/bin/bash
PicDir=$HOME/Desktop/Pictures
MovDir=$HOME/Desktop/Movies
for f in $PicDir/*
do
     if [ ! -d "$f" -a "${f##*.}" == "jpeg" ]; then
          comment=$(mdls -raw -name kMDItemFinderComment "$f")
          if [[ $comment != "(null)" ]]; then
               picname=${f##*/}
               movname=${picname%.*}.m4v
               if [ -e "$MovDir"/$movname ]; then
                     xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment "\"$comment\"" "$MovDir"/$movname
               fi
          fi
     fi
done

Spotlight/Finder only searching "new" spotlight comments not old ones

I have a bunch of files on my external hard drive that I had taken several hours to "tag" with spotlight comments a few months back. I tagged them so I could quickly find them in Finder or Spotlight by different key words and not just file names or their contents (folders wouldn't work because the keywords overlapped many of the files. Plus folders are slow). It worked beautifully. Until I stopped adding tags for those 4 months until now.
I hadn't been using my comments at all in the past couple of months, but i had some files that I hadn't tagged so I decided to take the time to tag all the new ones. While testing to see if the comments worked, I noticed an extreme shortage of results, compared to the results i had for the same key words 4 months ago. I noticed that only the newly tagged files were showing up. I immediately checked the old files to see if the comments were still there and there they were. I restarted my MacBook Pro, thinking that maybe it was because I hadn't done so in the past few days. I noticed the little dot in the lens of they eyeglass and thought "oh boy! it'll reindex everything!" but it only indexed "new" files of course.
So my question is: "*How did this happen?*" But more importantly: "*+How can I fix it?+*"
I've thought that forcing spotlight to reindex my entire external hard drive would do the trick, but I cannot find any means to achieve that goal. Plus, I would rather just be able to index the files within one folder as I wouldn't have to wait an entire day of sluggish performance for that. Any ideas?

Let me start with the "easy" question first: the .DS_Store files are where "Finder information" is stored. Windows users find these things a pain in neck, and usually insist they be deleted. Most of time this isn't a problem, the Mac users just get annoyed when their folder doesn't open the way it was when last closed--the principle information stored there is the view the folder was told to keep, the size of the icons and their arrangement, and so on. Every time you open a folder a .DS_Store file created if one does not already exist, and if one does the file will be updated if you change your settings for the folder, for instance switch it to List view, tell it to always open in List view, with columns for Date Modified, Size, but not Kind or Date Created. And it also keeps the information entered in Spotlight Comments. Just how Finder preserves this information if a file is moved, in Mac OS, to another folder, I don't know. But it does.
What we REALLY need is a nice little program to write to the metadata of the file. For instance, Spotlight will index keywords, which are stored in the file itself, as part of the file's metadata. I mainly work with graphics, and Photoshop allows you to add keywords to the file's metadata. Apple's iPhoto and Aperture will also add keywords, but they are not written to a file's metadata until you export them. PDFs can also have keywords assigned, you can even do it with Preview. Text documents can also have keywords added using some (most?) text editors, including TextEdit (provided the file is in RTF format). The nice thing about keyword metadata is that it goes with the file, and be accessed in any OS that allows a metadata search.
Unfortunately I don't know of any program that would allow you to select a batch of miscellaneous files and add the same keyword to all of them. It would certainly be handy though.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Spotlight Comments not found

I added "backup" as a Spotlight Comment to a variety of files and folders using an automator action. When I search using the query Spotlight Comment contains "backup" only a few of my files and folders with that comment are found. I have tried re-indexing but still Spotlight misses some files and folders. Spotlight in Tiger would find all of them. I believe in Leopard Spotlight Comments are now written in extended attributes. Can someone please try adding a Spotlight Comment to some files/folders and see if they are all found in a spotlight search. Thanks.

biovizier wrote:
..."I will say that Leopard seems a lot better at keeping track of comments than Tiger was but it probably wouldn't hurt to be mindful of how files are transferred to make sure the .DS_Store file goes with it. I personally would not rely on "Comments" for anything important.
Hmmm. It says in Leopard Help: +To make items easier to find when you search for them, you can use the Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info dialog. For example, use the field to mark all the files for a project with the project name or tag all your urgent files with the word “urgent".+
So, Apple are saying that it certainly should work - it is called 'Spotlight Comments' after all! What I've found though is that it's unreliable. I'm trying to reorganise all my filing around metadata - having just a few 'physical' folders and using a metadata+ Smart Folder combination to do the rest. To do this requires using the Spotlight Comments field (which can be accessed via a Finder search by using 'Other ...' from the Finder's searching popup menu. So, I having been using my own 'keywords' in the Comments field, but the problem is that sometimes Spotlight finds them and sometimes not. I can have the keyword in 6 files and spotlight will find 4 of them, sometimes all of them. I've re-edited and rearranged but cannot get consistent results.
Has anyone had a similar experience and found any pattern to what works and what doesn't?

Spotlight comments not found - possible fix

I'm having problems with spotlight comments not being indexed on some files.
The tip from djhartman http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1215039&tstart=0 fixed this:-
To remove ALL ACLs from your homedir, use:
chmod -R -N ~
Thanks a lot. The missing files soon after running the command appeared in the smart folder. I migrated from Tiger to Leopard and I have had various issues which I've only recently discovered is due to changes in how Mac OS X now handles access. Hopefully this command has done the job.
I also had some folders and files which were either missing the staff group or had permission problems. I used the following commands to fix this. 755 gives the current user read, write and execute access and gives the group the current user belongs to (probably staff or admin) read and execute access and everyone gets read and execute access. I only used these commands in folders containing my documents not in my ~Library or anywhere else that contains system files.
How to change folders or files to default user, group and permissions
Open terminal:
for folders use
chmod -R 755 (drag and drop folder here) [press enter]
(-R switch = recursively applies to all sub-folders and sub-files)
for files use
chmod 755 (drag and drop file here) [press enter]

Running the password reset actually recreated the problem but that's ok because it helped lead me to the true cause and answer. Being a member of the wrong group can cause all sorts of annoying problems e.g. asking for authentication when deleting files, spotlight not indexing some files etc. Luckily this post http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200711291134001 had the answer. I'll sum it up here:
I had a problem with spotlight not indexing some files especially spotlight comments. I'd tried deleting spotlight-V100 to re-index and many other things which did not work when all along it was a group membership problem.
I had upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. The GUI tools in Leopard showed my primary group was staff and nothing looked wrong until I discovered the Unix commands thanks to your great script. I didn't run the script but it was very well commented so I knew what the commands did if I ran them in terminal.
dscl . read /Groups/staff
showed I wasn't in the group staff. (even though system preferences>accounts>advanced options said i was!)
sudo dscl . append /Groups/staff GroupMembership $USER
added me to group staff.
sudo chgrp -R staff $HOME
changes group ownership on all files in home to staff.
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /
repair disk permissions.
Reboot.

Spotlight comments disappeared

I have a folder containing close to 300 aliases to other files in another folder. I added "Spotlight Comments" to most of them. Everything seemed to work for a long time. Recently, I cut and paste some long description text to the comment field in the info of the aliases. All of a sudden, all the comments in the folder disappeared. Other folders are fine.
Did I cross the line somewhere and exceeded certain limit and corrupted some kind of database file for the folder? Can I recovered those comments because they consist of work that spanned over almost two years.

I have a folder containing close to 300 aliases to other files in another folder. I added "Spotlight Comments" to most of them. Everything seemed to work for a long time. Recently, I cut and paste some long description text to the comment field in the info of the aliases. All of a sudden, all the comments in the folder disappeared. Other folders are fine.
Did I cross the line somewhere and exceeded certain limit and corrupted some kind of database file for the folder? Can I recovered those comments because they consist of work that spanned over almost two years.

Spotlight comments over a network

Hello,
I am using spotlight comments in the GetInfo window of my files as keywords for search. Everything works fine on my computer, but as I ove the files to our server, to an archive folder, I am not able to find the files using that comments. I use both smart folders and command-F from the Finder, selecting as searching criteria "Spotlight comments" but seems that this comments are not read. I checked and the comments are still written... Do I have to activate something may be on the server? Or is something like a bug in the "find" command?
thank you for your help.

Hi, Maurizio. Welcome to the Discussions.
The Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info window is actually identical to the Get Info "Comments" field in prior versions of Mac OS X. Accordingly, Spotlight Comments are saved only on your computer. Hence the Spotlight Comments are not copied to the server.
The instructions in "Mac OS X: Get Info Comments May Not Appear for Remote Volumes" apply to Spotlight Comments as well as the old Get Info "Comments."
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

Spotlight Comments are Disappearing

For some reason spotlight comments keep disappearing from files. I triple check the comments after I'm done adding them. The next day I check the files to see if they are there, and they are not.
I do not understand why this keeps happening.

Starnerg wrote:
I'm sure we could find the problem, but I can't afford to lose any of the comments that are working in the folders. It would take months to get them back.
When I type in mdls /path/to/file in terminal and drag the files in. The comment is still in kMDItemFinderComment, but not in the get info window. As long as the comment is in kMDItemFinderComment will comment still work the same?
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
When I tried to bring the comments back into Get Info yesterday by using the applescript below they came back, however when I checked today the went away again.
tell application "Finder"
set curfolder to choose folder
repeat with this_item in entire contents of curfolder
set ppath to quoted form of POSIX path of (this_item as alias)
set comment of this_item to (do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemFinderComment " & ppath & "| awk -F\\\" '{print $2}'")
end repeat
end tell
that looks like a script I made for somebody in a similar situation once. did you get it from one of my threads?
the fact that this keep happening does suggest that either the .DS_store file or the resource forks are corrupt. If you don't want to zap all .DS+Store files I really suggest you try it out on one folder of test files with the last terminal command I gave you. it will only affect that particular folder, nothing else. just copy a folder of files that have this issue and run the command on the copied folder. see what happens.

Spotlight comments search

I have a customer that upgraded to 10.5 server for the spotlight comments searching on share points. They can search everything else but the comments. We have tried setting up a group with all the users having full read/write permissions. I have reindexed the share points. I can search the comments from the xserve that the raid is attached to. Just not on any of the networked computers. The networked computers are all PowerMac G5s running Tiger. I have heard that having a space in the share point can cause problems and some of the share points have space but not all and they can't search the comments on any of the share points. We have tried searching files on the root directory as well as in folders on the share points. Has anyone else had this problem or have a suggestion?
Thanks

Hi TD
Yes and no.
Yes it worked the way you mentioned but if I change the Spotlight Comment: on the same file to something else I can still find it via 'Fruit'. I much prefer command-space bar to call Spotlight.
How long does it take a change to a Spotlight Comment: to filter into Spotlight?
Its not the end of the world its just I was finding Spotlight really useful until I came up against this.

How to copy a files spotlight comments for an entire folder and place them in a different file with that same name

I have the same question in a different discussion but I already marked it as solved because one of the questions was answered. Here's the linke to the other discussion if your interested https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5970421
I have movie covers saved as a jpeg for every movie my family and I own. There is about 700 and they each have a comment of the main actors, release dates, and descriptions. This makes it easy to find what to watch.Is there an applescript, automator, program I can download, or program code supported in xcode that will do the following set of inscructions?
Take the name of the picture file and spotlight comment, copy and paste it to a movie file's comments to a file with the same name but obviously has different extention. For an example
In a Pictures folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.jpeg       Comment: (2008) Genre: Action...             <- copy comment
In a Movie Folder
Name: Dark Knight, The.m4v       Comment:                                               <- paste
and do this for all 700 files

Clendenen02 wrote:
where should I run the code? in the terminal, or an applescript, or should put it in xcode and run it from there or the terminal.
What MrHoffman said.
But if it's easier, you can wrap it in Automator and have Automator ask for the Folders: (Test on a sample of your files before running on all 700 files)
(do you really own 700 movies??)
The Workflow is:
Put this in the Run Shell Script Action (and pass input as arguments":
PicDir=$1
MovDir=$2
for f in $PicDir/*
do
     if [ ! -d "$f" -a "${f##*.}" = "jpeg" ]; then
          comment=$(mdls -raw -name kMDItemFinderComment "$f")
          if [[ $comment != "(null)" ]]; then
               picname=${f##*/}
               movname=${picname%.*}.m4v
               if [[ -e "$MovDir"/$movname ]]; then
osascript <<-EOF
tell application "Finder"
set comment of file (POSIX file "$MovDir/$movname") to "$comment"
end tell
EOF
               fi
          fi
     fi
done
(BTW, I know that this is a bit of sloppy scripting (wraping an osascript in a Bash Script wrapped in Automator, but it does what you need)

Spotlight not working properly in Save and Save As dialog boxes

When I'm in any program and I go to the "Open Files" dialog box, I can use the spotlight search to search for files by name or by content, and it works fine. However in the "Save File" and "Save File As" dialog boxes, spotlight will only find folders by name. It will not find any files by name or by content in the current folder or anywhere else. It will only show any folders who's name is a match for what I type.
I spoke to Apple support who suggested that I reindex my drive, which I did, but it didn't help. Their next suggestion is to reinstall the OS, which I'm not going to do. By the way, I have a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro which both exhibit the same behavior, so it appears to be a problem with the OS itself. They are both running 10.6.1. I booted up in safe mode and had the same problem.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Mark

If you want to report this to Apple, either send Feedback or send bug reports and enhancement requests via its Bug Reporter system. To do the latter, join the Apple Developer Connection (ADC)—it's free and available for all Mac users and gets you a look at some development software. Since you already have an Apple username/ID, use that. Once a member, go to Apple BugReporter and file your bug report/enhancement request. The nice thing with this procedure over submitting feedback is that you get a response and a follow-up number; thus, starting a dialog with engineering.

Do Spotlight Comments Work on Folders?

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