In the search results, click the Documents or Files section header to view a list of files that meet the search criteria. See the search tips section for tips on searching for files. In the Search text field at the bottom of the Start menu, type part or all the file name you want to find.Scroll down through the search results list to find the file you are looking for, then click the file name to open it. The search results are shown below the Search text field.Click the drop-down list above the Search text field and select the Files option.As you type, results for your search are shown. Start typing part of the file name you want to find.Press the Windows key to access the Windows Start screen.Regardless, Spotlight is a very powerful tool and it’s good to know that users have the ability to reign it in when necessary.You can use the arrow keys to arrow up or down to the app, file, document, or setting you want to view and press Enter to open it. Most users will best served by using a combination of methods 2 and 3: excluding cloned backups via Spotlight Preferences and hiding a select few personal documents with “.noindex,” for example. This not only saves time (you don’t have to manually change the extensions of multiple files), it also prevents issues with standard application file extensions. In practice, of course, you’ll want to stick your “.noindex” folders somewhere out of plain sight.Īs we mentioned above, this technique works with both folders and files, but we recommend putting your sensitive files into folders and then applying the “.noindex” extension only to that top level folder. In our example, the “hidden” folder was on our desktop, which would still be easy to find by just looking at it. The benefit of this approach is that these manually excluded items do not appear in the Privacy tab of Spotlight’s Preferences, meaning that those snooping around won’t be able to easily locate your private or sensitive data. The folder and its contents are immediately excluded from Spotlight and any searches fail to return results from the folder. Now we’ll add “.noindex” to the end of the Private Documents folder (“Private Documents.noindex”). To prevent a specific folder or file from being indexed by Spotlight, add a “.noindex” extension to it.Īs an example, we have a folder on our Desktop called “Private Documents” containing a file called “Q3 Financial Results.rtf.” By default, searching for this folder or any file within returns a result with Spotlight. The previous methods to prevent Spotlight from indexing items on your Mac covered both folders and drives, but this trick only works with folders and files. Manually Hide Folders Using a Special Extension Thankfully, there’s still one final option. It’s like a treasure map to your private files and secrets. This is an easy way to manage Spotlight’s reach, but it includes one critical flaw: anyone with access to your user account can simply head to Spotlight’s Preferences and see exactly what you’ve chosen to hide. To remove items from the list, and thus make them searchable by Spotlight once again, select the item and press the minus icon at the bottom-left side of the list. To add items, you can either click the plus icon and navigate to the drive or folder you want to exclude, or you can simply drag and drop drives and folders into the list. Here you can choose which drives or folders to exclude from Spotlight’s index (note that yours may be empty if you only have a single drive in your Mac).Īdding a file or folder to this list will exclude it and its contents from Spotlight, meaning that they won’t appear during a Spotlight or Finder search. Head to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy. Instead of turning the whole thing off, you can simply exclude certain drives or folders from Spotlight by using its Preferences. You can measure the progress of the rebuild by clicking on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar.Įxclude Items Using Spotlight’s Preferences Note that after reenabling Spotlight, it will need to reindex your drive(s), a process that may take a while depending on the size of the drives and the number of changes that occurred since you disabled Spotlight. Sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/.plist
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