Spotlight doesn't find Skype messages.

"Messages & Chats" is selected for Spotlight Preferences but I suspect that it's not indexing Skype's message history. How can I add that to the list of what Spotlight indexes?

Hi,
Messages and Chats refers the the Storing of Conversations (iMessages) and Chats (Buddy List connections) that you elect to Save.
Where does Skype save it's chats to ?
Prior to Mountain Lion iChat Saved chats were in a folder called iChats inside the Documents folder of the Logged in User.
Path = Hard Drive Name/Users/(your account name)/Documents/iChats (Or ~/Documents/iChats)
Now Messages Saved items are stored in ~/Library/Messages/Archive requiring the specific search of something in the ~/Library, which is not normally searched.
7:55 pm Thursday; October 10, 2013
 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.4)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Similar Messages

Under Yosemite Spotlight doesn´t find my files

Under Yosemite Spotlight doesn´t find my files on the computer and connected hard drives. What can I do?

Try re-indexing Spotlight.
Spotlight – Re-index
See if you can find the file using this program
EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement

Spotlight doesn't find html files

I'm a web developer. I have thousands of ".html" files, such as "india.html"
Spotlight won't find them.
It does find "india.cfm" files so I'll assume the problem is the html extension.
If I Show All in Finder it does them ... in a Find window section called "Developer" ... which doesn't appear in Spotlight, or is a choice in Spotlight Preferences.
This used to work. I'm now using 10.9.5. I don't know at which update it stopped working ... I don't perform this often but when I do it's critical.
I've repaired permissions and reindexed the drive (twice, by adding and removing the drive from Spotlight index preferences).
Thanks.

A test...
Made a plain text file, saved to desktop, apple.html. Spotlight doesn't find it. Duplicated it. Change the name to apple.txt. Spotlight immediately finds it.
Spotlight is having a problem with html.
Checked the Spotlight RichText.mdimporter and it has:
<array>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>MDImporter</string>
<key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
<array>
<string>public.rtf</string>
<string>public.html</string>
<string>public.xml</string>
<string>public.plain-text</string>
<string>com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text</string>
<string>com.apple.rtfd</string>
<string>com.apple.webarchive</string>
<string>org.oasis-open.opendocument.text</string>
<string>org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document</string>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
... so that's in there...

Spotlight doesn't find search results in .HTML file contents

When I use Spotlight to search, it doesn't find any .HTML file contents. If I rename an .HTML file to use a .TXT extension, the contents are found. Is there a way to enable Spotlight to find contents in .HTML files?

I remembered that used to be problem, so I just checked on my local version of my site, and Spotlight found the files on the basis of content without a problem. So I took a look at my installed mdimporters in /Library/Spotlight, to see what may have led to this happy turn of events. I thought perhaps the iWeb mdimporter might be doing it, but was unable to find a reference to HTML in its type declarations. I then took a look at in /System/Library/Spotlight and discovered that RichText.mdimporter has a declaration for public.html as a content type. You should have that mdimporter installed by default, but you might take a look to make sure it is there.
If the mdimporter is there, but the html files aren't being indexed, it could be that whatever program you are using to create them isn't giving them the appropriate content type. I code by hand using TextEdit, which saves them with the following metadata entry:
kMDItemContentType = "public.html"
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
"public.html",
"public.text",
"public.data",
"public.item",
"public.content"
They are then evidently indexed without problem by the RichText.mdimporter. You might try opening one of your html docs in TextEdit (as plain text), resave, and see if Spotlight then picks up the content of the file. Of course, the content means the words that people see when they look at the page in a browser. If the content you are talking about is stuff that is inside an html tag, you are out of luck. I know of NO way to get Spotlight to find that. EasyFind will though, but it is a brute force search and will take awhile, even when restricted to a particular folder.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Leopard's Spotlight doesn't search Mail messages

Leopard's Spotlight isn't searching email messages. I made a clean install of 10.5, and have two POP accounts. The message files are right there under ~/Library/Mail/... . I rebuilt the index for the system volume by adding and then removing the volume from the Privacy zone in Spotlight preferences. I also tried some of the command-line suggestions posted elsewhere for this problem. I recently added my backup volume to the privacy zone, but other than that the zone is empty.
But the problem remains. Outside Mail.app, Spotlight never comes back with search results that are mail messages. Inside Mail.app, searching "entire message" returns 0 results. Does anyone know how to diagnose this problem? Can I see if a particular file is included in the metadata index?

Hahaaaa! Solved it - at least for me...
Please read the whole explanation first before just gabbing any presented commands and executing them in the Terminal. The solution requires no Terminal.
I had exactly the same problem described by MikeW and JJ. I tried everything like you before at no avail, too. But I tried one more thing that did work and indexed all my mail. Here is what I did at the command line. Don't type the command right away. It will work, but this is not the root cause of your problem, I present it just to explain:
find ~/Library/Mail -name "*.emlx" -exec mdimport {} \;
This searches for the individual message (*.emlx) files themselves and throws them one by one onto the mdimporter which imports them just fine. Still, a plain mdimport ~/Library/Mail would not work which pointed me in the right direction: Spotlight did not "see" these individual message files. But Why?
I fiddled a bit with file/folder permissions since I also simply upgraded from Tiger and ended up with old Tiger permission based user accounts. No result. I discovered, that in Finder the mailboxes, say ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/INBOX.mbox etc. were displayed as package files instead of folders. Strange. So again I tried mdimport -d1 ~/Library/Mail now with a bit of debugging. Aha! Spotlight imports this folder as type 'dyn.ah62d4rv4ge81g45mr3wgn8a', or similar, a dynamic UTI, instead of with 'com.apple.mail.mbox' as what it should have been. Since this unknown dynamic UTI dosn't mean anything sensible to Spotlight, it would simply skip the folder, not scanning it's contents with the well known result that mails cannot be searched by content.
So, what is essentially overwriting these UTIs? Especially because this would not happen in another Leopard-created user account. I felt guilty as I added some custom UTIs in the past, but nothing to do with mail at all. So who carries UTIs for Mail.app? Well... Mail.app! Another Mail.app? YES! I remembered, that I had an older complete pre-Spotlight system backup on my current system, including all applications including Mail.app in version 1.3.something. AFAIK only with Mail 2.0 Apple changed the way Mail saves messages and they apparently also changed the UTI of .mbox to the new format. I simply deleted the old version of Mail.app. Immediately after that the icons of the .mbox changed and I could open these folders in Finder. I tried again mdimport ~/Library/Mail and - boom - Spotlight imported all my mails!
Long story to explain my thoughts, here are 5 steps for you to try:
1. Search your system to find out if you have multiple different copies of Mail.app. You can do that with Spotlight/Finder or enter in the terminal:
sudo find / -type d -name "Mail.app" -ls
(You need to be admin to sudo, type your password when prompted)
2. Locate and check the found versions of Mail.app in Finder via the get info window.
3. Delete all but the actual copy of Mail.app in /Applications from your system (empty trash!).
4. Enter the following line in the terminal to have Spotlight import your messages:
mdimport ~/Library/Mail
Should take much longer now, depending on the number of mails you have.
5. Check the result by searching mail content in Mail/Finder/Spotlight, enjoy!
Note: If you did find and delete old versions of Mail.app, but step 4 did not work, you might have to log out and in or you can even try to restart the machine. In my case the result was instant. If all of that did not work for you - sorry - but probably the above helps you to track your particular problem down.
ecke

Spotlight doesn't find files after Time Machine re-load

So I just got a new macbook pro and transferred everything from my old laptop onto it using Time Machine, which worked amazingly ... only weird thing now is when i search in the Finder Search bar or in Spotlight, it doesn't find any files that were on my old computer. I can find them manually, for example, I can be looking at a file called "house-info.rtf" in my Documents folder, but if i search "house" or even "house-info" it comes up with 0 results.
Any new file (I've made or downloaded on my new machine) comes up fine in the search, it's just files from my previous computer moved over via time machine...
any ideas?

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Time Machine does not save Spotlight's index, so your drive has to be re-indexed. It may be that it just hasn't "caught up" yet. Give it some time.
If you're pretty sure it just hasn't done it, you can usually get Spotlight to re-index by excluding your internal HD from Spotlight (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy) for a few moments, then removing the exclusion. That should make it start over.

Spotlight doesn't find all files.

Hi guys,
i just installed Snow leopard on my old iMac that was running tiger before. With tiger i never had troubles like this and the same files im looking for now were always found. However spotlight doesn't seem to find them now. They are located in HD/library/.... anything in there cant be found and i didnt enable privacy for it.
After i moved one application out of there and dragged it on the desktop it was instantly found. Doesn't seem like a big deal since i know where the app is and i have it in the dock anyways, the problem just is that i am looking for other files that im not sure anymore if they are on the computer and if spotlight just doesnt find them it would take me a lot of time searching for them manually.
My question is, besides if you have a solution to fix this, if its due to snow leopard. Does it not look in the library anymore?
Thanks in advance folks,
P.S. i already re-indexed.

Spotlight does not search system folders by default. See,
Get Spotlight to search system files (and more)
Enter the search term in the Finder window's search field.
Click the [+] button in the search bar to add a search option.
In the first drop down menu choose Other.
Choose “System Files” from the list that pops up (and check the box to place in drop down menu to avoid this step later,) click on the OK button.
Now back in the Finder choose Include from the second drop down menu.

Spotlight doesn't find "numbers," in Numbers. Way to fix that?

Hi.
With Excel documents, Spotlight finds numbers within the document. i.e. an invoice number, an amount, etc.
However, Spotlight is not finding any numbers inside my Numbers documents.
Is there anyway to change or fix this? THanks for the help. Even if there is a third party way or something? Thanks!

i can imagine why spotlight does no indexing on data inside cells... it looks to me pretty useless to index files that have hundreds of reoccurring numbers numbers and numbers - would you like to have an overview of all files that has the number 6 in it, or 51.... and than to think of it that a lot of numbers in a table are not numbers at all, but only calculations
however, there is a way to get spotlight informed:
use the inspector, document (most left tab) there is a option to set various spotlight hints like author, title, keywords and comments
hope that will help
wished that Numbers and others were more scriptable, so i could get some cell contents and paste it into the keyword field there

Spotlight doesn't find a file it should

When i do 'grep strahler *' in my ~/Mail directory, i find one file. However, when i search for "strahler" using spotlight, it doesn't turn it up (it finds lots of other files, but not that one).
How could that be?
[my trust in spotlight is in tatters -- i thought it finds everything]
Best regards,
Gabriel.

< wonder what apple has to say about that ...
spotlight seems to be one of their selling points for the mac, doesn't it?>
Unfortunately, after a year of yelping and squealing and countless emails from users, directly to Apple, asking them to fix Spotlight, Apple so far has had nothing to say. I suggest you add an email of your own, to Apple Support, as apparently nobody (who matters) at Apple ever reads these forums.
Spotlight, and Dashboard, were the two new "features" that, about a year ago, persuaded people that Tiger was better than Panther.
It isn't.

Spotlight doesn't find

I'm searching for OmniWeb folders.
Spotlight finds
~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5
nothing else.
EasyFind finds
/private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/OmniWeb-<username>-1
/Applications/OmniWeb/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/OmniWeb.nib
~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5
~/Library/Caches/OmniWeb
~/Library/Caches/com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5
Spotless is completely useless if your intention is to do some developing. mdimport, mdutil, SpotlightIndexer, searching by filename in the Finder's Find window and other methods don't help, Spotlight cannot find by filename. It finds something and something not.
Since Spotlight finds apps by name, it's usable on my machine only as a kind of launcher.
Apple, please give us the bug fix! We are waiting since April 2005.
PowerBook G4 1.67 15" (late 2005) 1.5/120 GB Mac OS X (10.4.9) iPod mini 6GB

Hi Terence
I wrote before that SpotlightIndexer doesn't help. I did index *anything* /Users /Library /System /private /sbin /usr /automount /bin /cores etc. etc. and dozens of subfolders to be sure they will be indexed - nothing.
It's a bug because SL promises to find but it will not find.
Another bug is that SL gives the option to find invisible items but it never will find invisible items.
Enabling the Finder's Search (by disabling SL indexing) allows to find items by filename (much slower than Panther) as it should be and as it was possible in all previous Mac OSs.
Regards
Andreas
PowerBook G4 1.67 15" (late 2005) 1.5/120 GB Mac OS X (10.4.8) iPod mini 6GB

Spotlight doesn't find the contents of at least one file

Goal - find a clever way to discover what Spotlight has (or hasn't indexed).
I have an xls spreadsheet that has the names and emails addresses of people who attended a recent course of mine. In the past few weeks I need to search precisely which course someone attended. The person had a unique last name and so I just put the name into
spotlight. Nothing found. A few minutes of digging manually confirmed the person had attended the course I expected.
Related discoveries
none of the contents of that file is indexed by Spotlight - tested by searching other names
older xls files in the same folder are correctly indexed
Searching on the filename finds the file so the file itself is found by spotlight
Copy the column of names to a temp spreadsheet, save them and search - file find
Rebuilding the index from scratch warmed my CPU but didn't change anything
I've checked the simple spotlight preferences - xls spreadsheets aren't ignored
Since I don't know why its getting missed I'm concerned that other files might not get indexed properly as well.

I would suspect a corrupt file. It may be just damaged enough to stop Spotlight reading it properly.
If you select the file in the Finder and hit the space bar does it open in Quick Look? If it doesn't then it is broken.
Try opening it in Excel and copying and pasting everything into a new file.

Spotlight doesn't find application after AppStore update

This started happening with Type2Phone, an app from Houdah Software. Every time after I would update the app via the AppStore, Spotlight would no longer find the app (I use Spotlight for app launching). I contacted the developer, and following a series of steps, we found that what is happening is that somehow the updated app is having this attribute added to it:
kMDItemSupportFileType = ( MDSystemFile )
[This is the output of the mdls command]
This explains why Spotlight is no longer finding the app.
Now logically, he informed me that this command should remove the attribute:
sudo xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType /Applications/Type2Phone.app
But although the command executes, it doesn't remove the attribute! I.e.
mdls /Applications/Type2Phone.app/ | grep MDSystemFile
Still has " MDSystemFile" as output.
I've run Disk Utility to check for directory damage, rebuilt permissions, etc. to no avail. The only solution is to rebuild the Spotlight index completely -- but the problem will recur with a new update.
Although it inexplicably only happened every time I updated Type2Phone, now it's happening when I update Tweetbot.
Any insights into this problem which is driving me batty?

Try contacting apple on the chat now option

Spotlight doesn't find invisible files in Yosemite

Spotlight, under Yosemite 10.10.2, does not find invisible files, even when specifically requested to do it. The results window is empty.
Besides that, the insible property has disappeared from the Finder information windows:

Open System Preferences > Spotlight. Under the 'privacy' tab, drag your HD into the list from a Finder window. As soon as it's in the list, remove it.
Spotlight will now begin to reindex your entire HD. You'll see a dot in the middle of the spotlight icon and clicking the icon will tell you that it's re-indexing.
Regards,

Spotlight doesn't find files

I know there are two files on my hard drive called prefs.js. They are in my users library.
Why can't Spotlight find them?

mamanogabriel wrote:
It might be really late to answers this, but is better late than never. I am also frustrated with this (dis)hability to search in Mac. Apple prefers to do money selling songs and games rather to fix something that all the people asume works from the start.
Searching for your file names that YOU know they exists is quiet a problem.
Option A) Re index your hard drive. Look for the spotlight preferences and click on the "Privacy" tab. Then drag in your entire hard drive. Then, remove your hard disk clicking on the minus sign. Close your preferences. This will reindex your files into spotlight. After finishing reindexing, do your search again.
Option B) Do a simple search doing cmd+F. By default you will see little tabs below the Search title. Mine shows KIND is ANY. Click on the KIND tab and choose OTHER at the bottom, there it will appear a huge range of criteria to add for your searches. You might be able to look even into sysntem files.
Option D) (Recommended) Forget about Apple at all! Download this free app called EasyFind It is in the Freeware section (http://www.devontechnologies.com/download/products.html) This app looks EVERYWHERE. I been using this for years. It can even look for invisible files. Hope this helps.
What happened to Option C??????
I paid for a copy of Find Any File, as suggested by seventy one.

Spotlight won't find files in user folder

i have spoken to apple tech support on this and they continue to try to find a solution but.....
i have files that spotlight doesn't find. they are in my user folder. in fact, it won't find the folder (s) one is on my desktop, one in documents. (these are just the ones i've tested). when i take the folder and just put it on the hard drive (root level), spotlight finds it. also, apparently, it can be found when i put it in the user folder of another user. i would like to avoid reinstalling the system. any thoughts??

Start with http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html and my mod to Finder's Find at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6725932 for what you can change so you can find stuff.

Spotlight doesn't find Skype messages.

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