Help searching metadata in finder

Hello,
I have a long list of movie files in a folder. They have pretty random names, but it is not something I can change. What I can do is add a specific title to 'spotlight comments' and then try and search for that specific title in spotlight when need be. I thought this would work, but I get zero results back in my serach query. Any ideas why?
thanks
dan

It sounds like the Desktop folder's "bundle bit" may have become set, making it behave like a "package" instead of a folder.
You can try to fix it with Terminal, but the needed SetFile command normally requires a prior installation of Xcode Tools. Instead, I would try the following:
Download [Path Finder|http://www.cocoatech.com], which has a 30-day free trial period. Navigate to the Desktop folder from within Path Finder, select it, then File Menu>Get Info. If the "Bundle bit" box is checked, uncheck it:

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Search window in finder is too small

Hi
When I perform a search in a finder window (cmd + F) the window that opens is tiny (about 10% of my screens) and includes only two items: Search "This Mac" and a second button. The files found can only be sorted using three arguments (name, type and last opened). I want to change it to open on full screen and to include other criteria for sorting, at least size in addition.
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Hi Yarramalong,
As Ray says you can drag the window to expand it but I'm afraid it does work like other windows. It won't save a setting or toggle views by clicking the green button for minimum and maximum. It seems incongruous with Apple Human Interface Guidelines
AFA the choice of folders goes you can change the folder or drive it searches by by opening a standard finder window, then open a command-F window. Drag the folder you want to the menu bar. Then, close the Find window and reopen it. Whew! Not very intuitive either
-mj
Message was edited by: macjack

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This page might help: http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=44083
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Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Step 1
For this step, the title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the name of the crashed application or process. For example, if Safari crashed, you would enter "Safari" (without the quotes.)
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
Step 2
In the Console window, select
          DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION ▹ User Diagnostic Reports
(not Diagnostic and Usage Messages) from the log list on the left. There is a disclosure triangle to the left of the list item. If the triangle is pointing to the right, click it so that it points down. You'll see a list of crash reports. The name of each report starts with the name of the process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report related to the process in question. The contents of the report will appear on the right. Use copy and paste to post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot.
I know the report is long, maybe several hundred lines. Please post all of it anyway.
If you don't see any reports listed, but you know there was a crash, you may have chosen Diagnostic and Usage Messages from the log list. Choose DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION instead.
In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)
Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report—they're very long and rarely helpful.

YIKES! "Searching" & Spotlight not finding

OK, I'm scared. I copy the name of a file. I do a Cmd + F and paste the name of the file into the "Search for" field. Nothing. I have only one criteria, "Kind" "Any" I ask to search the directory it's in. No response. I remove and add the directory to the parameters continually. No response.
Spotlight not finding it either.
I try others. Same thing. Spotlight preferences are factory default and include "Music."
I have two files with the string I am looking for, one in a directory on my hard drive, not locked, I read and write to it daily. The other file is on a CD.
I ask to search both places. Spotlight finds the string on the CD but not on my hard drive. I started trying other files in other directories and I'm getting the same thing in the Finder Search. Spotlight not as bad, but still has problems.
This string is "stoddard." The file on the drive is actually located in two different directories and is labeled "1.01_stoddard.mp3" The one that it does find on the CD is "AUGUST 6 STODDARD.mp3"
Help me. This is scaring me. I've got tons of people I am converting to Mac. This is not going to go over well.
I've been looking and I just can't find any options or parameters I should be checking that would affect this. This is pretty simple stuff.
I tried looking for envelope.rtf which is in a completely different directory and Search did not find it though Spotlight did.
-Wm

My results are disturbing. My eMac G4 doesn't seem to have a problem with finding files. My G5 definitely does. And it has a few other funny glitches, like a couple of my Mail filters are wonky. I've set up hundreds of them and there are three that are just plain stuck and send the mail to unexpected places or don't filter at all.
Since the Spotlight glitch is intermittent, I don't think we can set up any benchmarks between us. Because Spotlight might not find envelope.rtf on my system, doesn't mean it won't find the filename on yours.
What you need to do is search for various files on your system and see if Spotlight finds them.
I doubt this is a string recognition problem, it's likely a search program error at the processor level. Probably something to do with the logic that makes the search appear speedy. Likely there's something in that programming that "falls out" when G5 is processing.
Apple is ****-bent on getting the G6 out there pronto. These anomalies may be why.
-Wm
Your results are strange.
If I try using your "1.01_stoddard.mp3" filename I
find the file with the Spotlight menu, the Spotlight
window and a smart folder.
If I delete the file, then search for it again
"1.01_stoddard.mp3" it is, of course not found, then
I create a new file and rename it to
"1.01_stoddard.mp3" Spotlight finds it immediately.
Do you want to try to debug this here in the
discussion?
multi
Mac OS X (10.4.3)
www.DiscoverYourMac.com
iMac G5 iSight 20" 2g RAM Mac OS X (10.4.3) eMac 700, iMac slot, original iMac, PowerMac.
iMac G5 iSight 20" 2g RAM Mac OS X (10.4.3) eMac 700, iMac slot, original iMac, PowerMac.
iMac G5 iSight 20" 2g RAM Mac OS X (10.4.3) eMac 700, iMac slot, original iMac, PowerMac.

How do you get search engines to find you

I'm creating my site for a client that wants to be the top of the lists when someone types in certain keywords. How can i do this? Pay for it? Free?
Someone told me to put as much information in a hidden text box on the homepage....
Thanks!
Kara
http://web.mac.com/karastout/iWeb/eggers%20site/cellar.html

Whomever told you to hide text is leading you down the wrong path. Doing dirty tricks like that may help you in the extremely short term but the bigger search engines are smart enough to figure out what you're doing. Dirty tricks are a great way to get your site banned from the search engines.
The best way to get good results is to make sure all important text is actually text on the page (not images), have fresh content (blogs are great examples of this, they tend to do well on search engines), and find good ways to get other sites to link back to your site (link farms are not what I'm talking about but think along the lines of reviews, interviews, forum signature posts, etc.).
Be very wary of people telling you they can guarantee you first page results in search engines. They may do that for a short while but search engines are constantly evolving and can drop you as quickly—if not quicker—than pick you up.
It takes time to get a site in the top rankings but there are other methods out there that are better in the long run.

HELP search field acting screwy

When I type something into the Search field in the HELP window in the FInder and I hit RETURN key, the whole HELP window just goes by by. What's up with this? More HELP corruption... again???? There is apparently a lot of corruption that goes on with Apple's HELP viewer. When oh when will HELP be fixed!

You may not realize it but the folks at the Genius Bar have to go through a few weeks of rigorous training ...
That is far from what it takes to qualify them to say if what they encounter helping users is due to a bug in the OS or from other causes. They are not trained to be engineers, they are trained to be customer support technicians. On the job, they are expected to solve customer problems expeditiously, not to spend hours studying code & log outputs on a case by case basis, looking for underlying common causes.
They are susceptible to the same form of myopia as others in similar positions or readers of these forums: because a disproportionally large number of the units they see have problems, they may begin to refer to the product as "buggy" in an ill-defined way, making little or no distinction between causes & effects, especially in programming errors vs. other causes. Some even go as far as using the term to refer to things that work as designed that they think should work differently.
This is not very helpful: it too often leads to users not looking for causes that they could eliminate themselves because they expect Apple to supply a "bug fix" for something that isn't an error in the programming it supplies.
You say you have fixed your problem. It seems to me that you have most likely treated a symptom without discovering or eliminating its cause. I do not believe it is typical for help viewer files to become corrupted -- mine & those of my friends & associates certainly have not -- so it seems unlikely that the cause is a genuine bug in the OS itself, which I would expect to affect hundreds of thousands if not millions of users. Sure, some won't use help or report any problems they have with it, but even considering that the numbers just don't add up.
It is true that this is based on assumptions I have made but I will stand by it, in large part because I'm aware that file corruption has many causes, some user or environmentally induced, some not. I don't completely rule out an obscure bug in the OS affecting select users, but it is not high on my list of probable suspects.
In any event, I hope your problem is solved & will not recur, whatever its cause.

Finder searches, but never finds!

So I've seen related topics, but never anything that has quite helped the problem. As the title states, my Finder works, but using the search bar never finds anything. Finder will continue to search and search and search without producing any results. Spotlight also does this. I have tried repairing permissions, repairing the disk, booting from install disc, repairing from the disc, today I tried deleting the .plist files for finder and sidebar, but this resulted in nothing but making my desktop icons big (default size). Along with these problems, within the last several months, I have been unable to use the preview window option in finder as any time it tries to pull up a preview, the system freezes up for several minutes until the preview appears. ALSO, if I try to use the 'Get Info' command, the systems freezes the same way. I'm assuming that these problems are all related, as they all use some form of the finder. Any suggestions?

The fact that Spotlight won't index suggests you either have some hack which interferes with Spotlight, or data corruption that is interfering with it. I'm not sure that installing the combo update as BDAqua suggests will help or not. While it may give you a fresh copy of some system files, if it misses a cache or preference file for something that conflicts with Spotlight you are still going to be left in a lurch. Backup your data first since you still have access to your hard drive*:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
Once that is done, we can analyze what may be corrupting Spotlight.
It is better to have a backup even with corrupt files which you can extract user saved data from than none at all.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Search doesn't find the words water or plants! What can I do to fix this?

OK, you're not going to believe this. Search cannot find any events with the words water or plants in them! Here's the background. I had multiple calendar entries for "Water Plants". I deleted one, then deleted the other. I then entered a new event called "Water Plants." Search does not find it. It finds every other event, but not that one.
Now, here comes the even stranger part. I added the word stargaze in front of the entry--so it reads "Stargaze water plants" -- and it finds the event if I search for stargaze. In fact, I can add virtually anything in front of water plants and it finds it. It'll even find "Warm water plants" (search for "warm") but not "water plants" or "water water plants."
I've tried several things. I did the home button--power button hold til restart, no change. I synched via iTunes; no change. I've deleted the event, switched to a different day, and added it again. No dice. I've turned off and on again the Events option in Spotlight Seach setting. No luck. I even reordered the search items (putting events at the top of the search or in different places).
It also won't find the event if I search for just "plants". I just created two additional events: "Plants" and "Warm water" and it cannot find them if I search for "water" or "plants". "Wa" "Pl", etc. do not work. Create "Stargaze" again and I can find it.
Any ideas? It's as if my having deleted two events deleted the words (and subsets of letters) from the Spotlight Search vocabulary.

Try: Settings>General>Spotlight Search...remove the checks next to every item, then reset your phone: Press the Sleep/Wake button & Home button at the same time, keep pressing until you see the Apple logo, then release. Now, go back into Settings & turn back on what items you want for Spotlight Search.

Search won't find an event two years in the future

Normally I can locate future items in the Calendar app on my iPhone 4S by using the search function from the home screen. Recently, however, I entered a repeating event for August 2015, and the search function will not find it. I tried some other actions to try to narrow down the problem, and this is what I found:
When I search for the name of the event, search does find an e-mail with the same word (an all-caps acronym) in its subject line.
When I take time to go to August 2015 and look for the event, it is still there. It also appears in the iCloud version of my calendar.
Search does find other repeating events and other all-day events.
Search does not find a nonrepeating test event scheduled on 10 August 2015.
Is there some kind of restriction on how far in advance the search function looks at the calendar, and if so, does anyone know how far ahead it looks and why a restriction exists?
Or is there another explanation of something I'm doing wrong? It's really tedious to go two years ahead in the calendar, and it would be even worse if I had forgotten the month of the event I was looking for.

I'm having the same problem with the Calendar App but on my iPad. I entered a medical procedure reminder as an All Day Event in Calendar and neither the Spotlight Search or the Calendar search will find it. I know it is on the desired date in 2016 because I have gone to that date on the Calendar and I see it.

The "Search" facility in Finder doesn't find files I know are on my Mac.

I just typed "7-minute" into the Search bar on Finder for "All My Files" looking for a document I'd saved a few months back and the result came up with no documents. I looked in my Documents folder and there was the document I was looking for, "7-minute workout". This has been happening a lot lately. I've also noticed this same anomaly in Mail, where I will search for a keyword that I am absolutely sure is in a email, and it will come up blank, or only find recent examples and not old ones (I have all my emails back to 1999: disk is cheap.) I'm on Mac OS 10.8.5.
The only thing I can think of is that I had the 256 GB hard disk on my early 2008 20-inch iMac replaced with SSD recently (professionally, but not by Apple.) It runs much faster, but did I give it Alzheimer's in the process?
(btw, I'm a 35-year tech vet, including 3 years with Apple, so don't worry about being technical in a response.)

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -k Sender mdworker -o -k Sender mds | grep -v 'boxd\|Norm' | tail | open -ef
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

I have MAC OSX 10.5.8 and need to install adobe illustrator. I checked the compatibility and found that CS5 will work.Can any one help where i can find it. The trail version is fine with me.

I have MAC OSX 10.5.8 and need to install adobe illustrator. I checked the compatibility and found that CS5 will work.Can any one help where i can find it. The trail version is fine with me as i just have to use it for couple of days till i get my mac book back from service. Can any one help me on this.

You are welcome, ameronweb.
To elaborate a bit, you may come across offers of a new/unopened/unregistered version, which is the simplest case (you would need a guarantee). Other cases require much detailed information (and a guarantee).
If upgrading to 10.6.8 or higher is an option, you could use CS6.

Help searching metadata in finder

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