Spotlight comments problem

I have many files on my iDisk, that on my imac at home I have added spotlight comments to. I can then search by these comments. Works great.
Via iDisk sync, these same files are on my iMac at work; in my idisk folder. These files show the comments as being present. When I try to search for these comments, find does not show the files. I have reindexed the idisk; still no success.
Any ideas?

I suspect your workflow includes 'get select finder items' as the first action. get rid of it. it's redundant in a service that accepts files and folder in finder. that's why everything happens twice.

Similar Messages

Problem with add Spotlight Comments script.

Hello,
I am trying to add Spotlight Comments to some files using Automator. I have made an very simple script in Automator that add Spotlight Comments to the files that I have selected in Finder. I save this script as an app and it work great. I also save the same script but not as an app but as a service. The problem here is that when I run the service it add the same Spotlight Comment two times. For example, if I add "@Webshots" with the app the Spotlight Comments of the files is "@Webshots" but when I do it with the service the Spotlight Comments of the files is "@Webshots" "@Webshots". Can anybody help me with this? I will appreciate it a lot any help that you could give me. Thanks

I suspect your workflow includes 'get select finder items' as the first action. get rid of it. it's redundant in a service that accepts files and folder in finder. that's why everything happens twice.

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

Can't add/edit Spotlight Comments in Apple default apps

I can't add text to the Spotlight Comments field (via Get Info) in Apple's apps installed by default. The computer just beeps when I try to type something. However, I have no such problem with 3rd party apps.
Is this a bug or is there something I have to do to allow Spotlight Comments?
The permissions on all Apple apps installed by Snow Leopard are "system: "Read & Write," "wheel: Read only," and "everyone: Read only."
Thanks.
Message was edited by: Gunny Sack

Someone else noted that and I tried a few and couldn't edit them, even after giving myself write permissions. It might be tied to some form of code signing/protection.

Batch Renaming loses Spotlight Comments, Os X to blame?

I posted this over at the Adobe forum for Bridge, however, I'm going to post it here too because part of me feels like this issue I'm experiencing is tied to a recent Os update: from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
I'm a photo editor for a wedding photographer and have been implementing some of my own personal workflows into his pipeline. I tend NOT to rename camera-generated files, at all, unless there's an important reason to do so. Sorting an entire wedding by "Date" works perfectly for building the proper timeline for a shoot. So camera-generated file names are perfectly okay for our needs.
When an edit is complete I'll generate JPEGs from Aperture. The resulting files will continue to carry the original RAW files names, unless there is a duplicate file name, then Aperture will add a number: "(1)" to the file, if necessary. Typically, after export, I run an Automator action that stores the file name in the Spotlight Comments. Because prior to shipping and archiving, I AM going to rename the final JPEGs sequentially: 0001_wedding, 0002_wedding, etc.
The beauty was that with the original name stored in the Spotlight comments for the JPEG, I would easily look at 0148_wedding.jpg, see that it's spotlight comments said, "Original Name: IMG_3471" and obviously know exactly what RAW image this new JPEG started as. Worked perfectly.
So process was: Export, Store Original Name in Spotlight Comments of JPEGs, Batch Rename (sequentially) based on date modified in Bridge CS4.
Well now everthing's changed. We had a system drive go down. We were running 10.5.8. When the system came back from the shop, with a new drive installed, it was/is running Snow Leopard. 10.6.3? I think. Snow Leopard, no doubt.
And now my prior workflow has been wrecked because the act of renaming, in Bridge CS4, erases all those handy Spotlight comments. However, part of me is wondering though if this issue is rooted more deeply, at the OS level? Because R-Name (Batch renaming utility) is now eradicating Spotlight comments as is an Automator action built for the same purposes. This all used to work perfectly. And the one major change that has occurred was this "upgrade" from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
So, question is: is there something I can alter in Bridge Preferences to maintain my Spotlight Comments, when batch renaming? Is this all tied to the Snow Leopard? Is there ANY renaming utility that's not going to fall victim to whatever the hang up here is?? How can I batch rename and not destroy my lovely Spotlight Comments in the process?
Thanks for your time!!

Yes, this works. However, this was already part of my workflow.... and not where the trouble lies.
After exporting jpeg images from Aperture, they carry the same name of the original RAW files, from which they came. (So, IMG_8342.jpg would have started it's life as IMG_8342.CR2.) But we dont' send them out like that. We sequentially name them 0001_image.jpg, 0002_image.jpg, etc... So after renaming, how do you find the original file again, right?
BEFORE the renaming phase, I would run the "Store Original Names in Spotlight Comments" action. That way, I could look at the comments for a derivative .jpg—whose name has now changed—and determine the name of the ORIGINAL file.
After renaming, the derivative file might end up being named 0361_image.jpg, but it's Spotlight comments would say, for example, Original Name:<<IMG_8485.jpg>>. Then I would know that this particular file started off as IMG_8485.CR2.
As such, I could quickly/easily backtrack, knowing that the original RAW file was named IMG_8485.CR2
The issue is that once you've gone thru the effort to ADD these spotlight comments, if you THEN go through a re-naming step, this erases all those Spotlight Comments. That was my problem... Getting the Spotlight Comments in place was never the issue. KEEPING them there was the problem.

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

Collections in finder, quick add to spotlight comments

I'm wanting to optimize the way I'm using spotlight, and know that there's a field for spotlight comments when you select and item in finder and command-i... I'm wondering if there's a keyboard shortcut that can let me add spotlight comments directly, or is there a Quicksilver plug-in that might let me do that?
Also, within spotlight is there a way to configure it so that the first (or only) items to come up are the ones that I've added the relevant spotlight comments to?
Basically what I'm wanting to do is to add the metadata that would effectively make collections like in Yojimbo or Notemind... I love Yojimbo's idea, but I don't want a separate database for all my yojimbo collections... I don't want to be bound to Yojimbo and don't want it always running in the background... the finder is already a fabulous database, and between QS and spotlight you can do a million more things than Yojimbo can let me do... so I would love to get this "collections" effect inside finder without making a million aliases for my files...
Any suggestions?

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

How can I disable spellcheck in "Spotlight Comments" window?

How can I disable the daft spellchecking in the “Spotlight Comments” section of OS 10.8.3’s “Get Info” windows? I don’t have that problem in my older Mac, which has OS 10.5.8.

I don't really see it as a march backwards, but then I'm not a great speller or typist so I'm happy to have it check my comments.
Is there some specific reason you call the service "daft"? I assume you know you can always add words to the spelling dictionary. I have done that for a few made up "words" I use as tags. That way, I know if I have accidentally misspelled them & there is no mystery about why a Spotlight search doesn't include them.
Would that work for you?

Support for Spotlight Comments Yet?

One of the glaring problems with iPhoto is its lack of support for Spotlight. I took 2 months to meticulously add Spotlight comments to all of my archived photos, only to find that when I import them into iPhoto, I can no longer search by metadata. How idiotic was that? Not even a utility to import them! Did they finally fix this in iPhoto 6?

Nope, just tried this and the Spotlight Comments are lost: Not attached to the copy that's made in the iPhoto Library, and not imported into any field in the photo's metadata.
Spotlight Comments seems a bit of a last minute good idea that never took off to me. I wonder if it will be exploited in future releases or if it will quietly get stuck as borderline useful as it is now. I agree: Apple added this field to Get Info; you'd think they'd make use of the **** thing in their software!

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 available?

I've developed an internal website at work that uses PHP, MySQL, Applescript and PDF files to manage the workflow for print projects.
The basic setup is that a user "publishes" a PDF from InDesign using an Applescript (which ensures the PDF is created with standard settings and file security) and the PDF is copied to the webserver into a folder for review. The applescript then puts the designer's name into the PDF's Spotlight comments.
Someone reviews the project from a web-page, which looks in the folder and displays thumbnails of its contents. PHP runs an exec() to get the Spotlight comments, and displays the designer's name below the thumbnail, along with the date and time the PDF was "published".
$PDFcomment = exec("osascript -e 'tell app \"Finder\" to get comment of POSIX file \"$projectsFile/$shortID/$dirShort.pdf\"'");
The problem I'm running into is that this command is not consistently returning the Spotlight comment. Often the PHP webpage says it's empty, but when I go to the networked volume where these PDFs are stored and Get Info, I can see the correct comment.
The comment will only appear if I use the Finder on the machine that houses the PDF and Get Info. Subsequent viewings of the PHP webpage then return the correct comment.
How can I force the Finder to get the current Spotlight comment without having to manually check the file first?
PowerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

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 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 - max length?

Is there a maximum number of characters that can be in a Spotlight comment entered in a Get Info window, or perhaps are there forbidden characters?
I have a bunch of images that I've downloaded and pasted a description into the Spotlight comments. Now it's been several days and when I tried a search that yielded no results I realized that the Spotlight comments for these files are now empty.
A search here yielded a similar problem where comments disappeared and the solution offered was to run in Terminal "mdimport -n (FILENAME)". This did nothing for our missing comments.
Can anyone suggest what my be going on and hopefully a reasonable solution?
Message was edited by: Notary Sojak

Hello,
Check this out: Organize files with Spotlight comments
And here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008443.html
Carolyn

Spotlight Comments No Showing Up in Get Info

I moved thousands of video files to new folders (Drag & Drop Method). Now the spotlight comments for the files are no longer showing up in the get info window. I'm devastated because the comments contained critical information about the video. Without the comments, the organization of the files is a mess. I have no idea how to fix this problem.

ok, this shows that the spotlight comment "the Kat" is retained in spotlight database as it's recorded in the kMDItemFinderComment field. then the problem is likely corruption of the .DS_store files for the folders containing those files. I really don't know why this happens and what's the proper way of dealing with this but I made the following workaround for the same problem while helping someone else in the past
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10549447
paste the following into AppleScript Editor
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Finder"
set mlist to selection
set curfolder to item 1 of mlist
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</pre>
select the folder containing all those items (they can be in subfolders) and press 'run" in applescript editor.
Message was edited by: V.K.

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 problem

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