Spotlight can't find file

I just saved a file in a subfolder in my documents, but Spotlight is not able to find it. It is a .png file (picture file). Spotlight does however find other files in that folder. I'm searching via filename, not content. If I open the folder, I can see and use the file without a problem. I have copy/pasted the file name to make sure it is not misspelled.
Any insight into why spotlight is proving useless here will be greatly appreciated. I'm loosing faith in OS X and I'm really sad about it.
Thanks

Dimitris, my own suggestion is very simple: forget Spotlight. Disable it using Spotless, which is available here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33800
Then download either, or both Easyfind http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8707 and Find File http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10906315
I haven't used Spotlight for over a year now, and have even found a way to remove that pesky magnifying glass from my menubar.
I can find anything I want, any time I want, very fast and simply and above all - reliably.
<Edited by Moderator>

Similar Messages

Spotlight can't find file (even after re-indexing)

I have a files right on my desktop that neither spotlight or finder can find in their search results. Don't know when this started happening, but very weird. I've re-indexed several different ways but still no luck. Anybody run into this?

Baltwo: Thanks for the try, but your answer had no bearing.
The PROBLEM (which I solved) was that the user (the name with the little house next to it), had had its priveleges changes from Read/Write to Write Only (Drop Box).
I have no idea how or why that happened, but the result was Spotlight couldn't find anything. Once I put the privelege back to Read/Write, everything works fine now and Spotlight is once again all seeing! The priveleges are those little Sharing and Permissions section at the bottom of the Info summary (Get Info).
I am back to using Spotlight again and I've made sure any changes to me (the user) are under my lock and key.

Spotlight can't find files on my camera's SD card.

If I do a search (via Spotlight, via the "pill" oval, or via cmd-F) on my 32gb SD card for "RW2" (Panasonic RAW file), I get nothing. If I do the same search on my HDD, I get lots of hits, as there are lots of RW2 files on my machine, but none of the results reside on the SD card. This tells me Leopard can see the files, just not on my SD card.
The card is FAT32 by neccessity. Is there something I'm doing wrong to not be able to acess the files via Spotlight? EasyFind finds them in 2 seconds.
Thanks.

I've had some luck with excluding a drive and then removing the exclusion. This triggers spotlight to reindex a drive, maybe a memory card too?

Spotlight can't find files

Hi,
I work in a production plant where we're cross-referencing thousands of catalogue numbers over a few drives. Spotlight has always seemed to work flawlessly, but we've recently installed the latest os update and suddenly, we have disappearing files. If you access the file through the finder, it's there, but spotlight (nor any of the system search tools) can find the file... and this is a blatant search like "1490" - when the file name is "MFA1490.pdf" for example.
Can someone tell me what the crap is going on here? It's got me spooked to say the least. As a side note, we have another machine running Panther and we were able to locate the file over the network using that machine.
I did a verify on the drive we were searching and it came up clean.
Noticed another forum where someone was making a similar complaint, but whoever the correspondant was, didn't really say anything other than "go out and buy file buddy" and marked the forum 'solved'.

Hey, Pluggernaut.
I'm not sure what precise Spotlight glitch you've happened upon, or how to fix it, but even if I knew and could tell you how to repair or work around it, it'd still leave you spooked! Spotlight is fascinating technology that makes many new things possible, but Apple made a big, big mistake by hanging all of the OS search functions off of SL and its index. The pre-Tiger Find command searched the hard drive directly (and all of it) for matches - you couldn't search content or many kinds of metadata, but you had confidence in the results at least. If Find didn't find it, it wasn't on your machine. Period. SL by contrast relies on the index for everything - meaning that if a file is in a place that SL doesn't index by design (and they don't tell you what locations), or has been designated private, you can't ask about it at all. Worse still, SL might for some reason fail to complete its index, or the index can become corrupt, and SL has no way of informing you of this. And again if it's not in the index then it's invisible to Spotlight. The upshot is that a negative search result in SL may mean either that no matching file exists - or SL has missed it for one of these many reasons. There is no way to tell which it is - you just have to guess. Or I suppose, simply take it on faith that the answer is complete. (Indeed I think you can't really defend Spotlight without some measure of Faith - faith that it is, in fact, always working correctly or perhaps faith that Apple, in its inscrutable wisdom, really does know what is best for us. But I digress.)
The bottom line is that if you need to be confident that your filename searches are comprehensive then you must abandon Spotlight for that and turn to a non-index based mechanism like Easyfind, or Panther's Find command (if you can bear the pain of reinstalling your OSes).
Of course the fix from Apple is obvious - let Spotlight handle the cool stuff and return the mundane, workaday search duties to a Find-type utility like Finder. (Or at least return it to the OS so people can use it when they have to be confident in the answer.) Meanwhile, good luck!

Why my spotlight can not find my personal files ? It can find them before but can not find them now,I want to know why?

why my spotlight can not find my personal files ? It can find them before but can not find them now,I want to know why?

From the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Spotlight ▹ Privacy
The list of items excluded from Spotlight indexing is shown (it may be empty.) Click the plus (“+”) icon to add an item to the list. Select your boot volume (under DEVICES) and add it to the list. Then remove it from the list by selecting it and clicking the minus (“-“) icon.
Spotlight will rebuild the index. If you try to do a Spotlight search now from the magnifying-glass icon in the top right corner of the display, a pulsing dot will appear in the icon. When the dot disappears, the indexing is complete.

Spotlight still can't find files that are right in front of me

Sigh. I'm noticing that Spotlight still cant find files correctly. Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but when I do a search on "This Mac" for a "File Name", and the "Kind" is set to "Folders", and I set the word "Wonder" as the search parameter, how come it results in no items, yet I'm LOOKING at a folder called "The Wonder Stuff" in my music library? All the Spotlight file types are checked "on" and nothing is being excluded or is set to private.
God, I long for the System 9 find. I really do. Almost every day.

Hi,
When you say "Spotlight," are you using the text-input box that displays when you click the magnifying glass at the upper right-corner of the menubar? Or are you pressing command-F in the Finder and using a Finder window?
When I type "Aimee" in the Spotlight text input box mentioned above, it returns/finds the "Aimee Mann" folder that is in my Music folder.
Have you checked out EasyFind? It might meet your needs.
Hope this helps!

HT3787 How do I find the previous local copy yourMobileMeMembername.sparseimage? Spotlight can't find it.

This support article explains where the local copy of my iDisk should be within my computer:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3787
The problem is, Spotlight can't find this file.
Any tips?

You can get Firefox 3.6 from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

Spotlight can't find song text in iTunes

In iTunes you can type the text of a song in the field: Text - but Spotlight can't find this information.
But if you copy the same text in Info - and the box: comments - Voila - Here we go!
It would be a good thing if Spotlight can find all the information you have about your songs - like text from a Dashboard widget - (this text file IS FOUND!)
Is it possibel for Spotlight to find this information?
Thanks

Hi, flemminglimar.
There's no "Text" field in the Get Info window for any song I have in iTunes. I'm running iTunes 6.0.2.
If I launch iTunes, Control-Click a song, select Get Info from the resulting context menu, then click the Info tab, there's no Text field therein.
Have you installed some tool like ID3X for adding lyrics to sounds?
iTunes now includes a Lyrics tab into which one can type or paste song lyrics. This seems to be a relatively recent addition to iTunes. Adding content to the Lyrics tab of a song file actually writes them inside the song file itself, but Spotlight does not find them. It appears that the Spotlight plug-in for Audio has not been updated since Tiger was released and does not index the lyrics, hence it cannot find songs based on their lyrics.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

Can not find file must locate each song one at a time need to restore my whole library

can not find file, must locate each song one at a time need to restore my whole library

Hello BadSteve,
It sounds like iTunes seems to have lost track of all your music and you must locate each file individually. I would recommend at this point that you check for 3rd party plugins to see if there are any causing an issue:
iTunes: Troubleshooting issues with third-party iTunes plug-ins
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3430
If the issue persists after removing the plugins, I would next try recreating your iTunes library:
iTunes: How to re-create your iTunes library and playlists
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
Regards,
Sterling

I am trying to install itunes 10.5.1 but it can't find file IXP609.TMP where can i get this

i am trying to install itunes 10.5.1 but it can't find file IXP609.TMP so stopping the upgrade. how do i upgrade itunes? I tried uninstalling but it can't find another file 389 so I can neither uninstall nor reinstall. Any thoughts please?

Hi Rick,
by "repair" I mean I went to the control panel, option - programs and features, and in the list of all my installed programs I selected "Apple Software Update". On top of the screen you find the options Uinstall, Change and Repair. I clicked the repair button and that did the trick. After the repair I could uninstall the program. I also uninstalled iTunes, Apple Application Support, Apple Mobile Device Support en Bonjour, thus all Apple programs. Then I installed iTunes 10.5 again and everything went fine.
Success,
Peter

SEVERE: null : Can't find file '/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml'

I'm trying to get Tiles to work with Struts on my server. I'm running a local instance of Tomcat v5.5. Development environment is Eclipse. I"ve looked everywhere on the web and can't find any solutions that work. I've been working on this for several days now. It shouldn't be this hard...
I appreciate any help or suggestions people might have. I would really like to get beyond the configuration $#!^ and start coding.
Thanks in advance!!!
Jim
Here are snippets from the pertinent files:
web.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
     <display-name>
     admin</display-name>
     <welcome-file-list>
          <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
          <welcome-file>index.htm</welcome-file>
          <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
          <welcome-file>default.html</welcome-file>
          <welcome-file>default.htm</welcome-file>
          <welcome-file>default.jsp</welcome-file>
     </welcome-file-list>
     <servlet>
          <servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
          <servlet-class>
               org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet
          </servlet-class>
          <init-param>
               <param-name>config</param-name>
               <param-value>/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml</param-value>
          </init-param>
          <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
     </servlet>
     <servlet-mapping>
          <servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
          <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
     </servlet-mapping>
     <jsp-config>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>struts-bean</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/struts-bean.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>struts-logic</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/struts-logic.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>struts-html</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/struts-html.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>struts-tiles</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/struts-tiles.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/fmt.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt-rt</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/fmt-rt.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/core</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/c.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/core-rt</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/c-rt.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/sql</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/sql.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/sql-rt</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/sql-rt.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/x</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/x.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
          <taglib>
               <taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/jstl/x-rt</taglib-uri>
               <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/x-rt.tld</taglib-location>
          </taglib>
     </jsp-config>
</web-app>
struts-config.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE struts-config PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 1.2//EN"
"/WEB-INF/dtds/struts-config_1_2.dtd">
<struts-config>
     
     <data-sources />
     
     <form-beans>
     </form-beans>
     
     <global-exceptions />
     
     <global-forwards />
     
     <action-mappings>
          <action path="/foobar" forward="/createAccount.jsp" />
     </action-mappings>
     
     
     
          <plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin" >
          <set-property property="definitions-config" value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml" />
          <set-property property="definitions-debug" value="2" />
          <set-property property="definitions-parser-details" value="2" />
          <set-property property="definitions-parser-validate" value="true" />
          </plug-in>
     
</struts-config>
tiles-defs.xml (in the WEB-INF directory as are the other xml files...):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 1.1//EN"
                                             "http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/tiles-config_1_1.dtd">
<tiles-definitions>
     <definition name="Tiles.register" page="/tiles/template.jsp">
          <put name="header" value="/tiles/header.jsp" />
          <put name="body" value="/register.jsp" />
          <put name="footer" value="/tiles/footer.jsp" />
     </definition>
</tiles-definitions>
Console output when starting the server:
INFO: Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/5.5.17
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:41 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost start
INFO: XML validation disabled
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:43 AM org.apache.struts.tiles.xmlDefinition.I18nFactorySet initFactory
SEVERE: null : Can't find file '/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml'
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:43 AM org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin initDefinitionsFactory
SEVERE: Can't create Tiles definition factory for module ''.
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:43 AM org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet init
SEVERE: Unable to initialize Struts ActionServlet due to an unexpected exception or error thrown, so marking the servlet as unavailable. Most likely, this is due to an incorrect or missing library dependency.
javax.servlet.ServletException: null : Can't find file '/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml'
     at org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin.initDefinitionsFactory(TilesPlugin.java:233)
     at org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin.init(TilesPlugin.java:137)
     at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.initModulePlugIns(ActionServlet.java:869)
     at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.init(ActionServlet.java:336)
     at javax.servlet.GenericServlet.init(GenericServlet.java:211)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.loadServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1105)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.load(StandardWrapper.java:932)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.loadOnStartup(StandardContext.java:3917)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4201)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1013)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(StandardHost.java:718)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1013)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:442)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:450)
     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:709)
     at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:551)
     at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
     at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
     at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
     at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:294)
     at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:432)
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:43 AM org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationContext log
INFO: Marking servlet action as unavailable
Jul 7, 2006 11:36:43 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext loadOnStartup
SEVERE: Servlet /admin threw load() exception
javax.servlet.UnavailableException: null : Can't find file '/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml'
I have the following jars in my Web App Libraries (WEB-INF/lib):
standard.jar
commons-fileupload.jar
antlr.jar
struts.jar
commons-beanutils.jar
commons-logging.jar
commons-validator.jar
myswl-connector-java-3.1.12-bin.jar
struts-el.jar
jstl.jar
commons-digester.jar
Struts is version: 1.2.9.
JRE / JDK: 1.5.0_06 (Program files shows I have JRE 1.5.0_05 in the tree as well)
Note: Struts will work if I comment out the tiles plug-in in the struts-config.xml file.

you don�t call o files-defs.xml in jsp?

I get itunes can't find file when I tried to play a TV show I had purchased that was supposed to be in the cloud. There are several of these, including an entire season. In the store it shows that I purchased these shows when I checked them.

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Try this...
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Hopefully it's not been too long since you last upgraded iTunes, in fact if you get an empty/incomplete library immediately after upgrading then with the following steps you shouldn't lose a thing or need to do any further housekeeping. In the Previous iTunes Libraries folder should be a number of dated iTunes Library files. Take the most recent of these and copy it into the iTunes folder. Rename iTunes Library.itl as iTunes Library (Corrupt).itl and then rename the restored file as iTunes Library.itl. Start iTunes. Should all be good, bar any recent additions to or deletions from your library.
See iTunes Folder Watch for a tool to catch up with any changes since the backup file was created.
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tt2

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thanks,

teit:
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https://discussions.apple.com/message/12289978#12289978

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You now need to import those files into Lightroom.
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Spotlight can't find file

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