Mastering the Finder-Spotlight tag team combo

Welcome to Part 2 of our Switch to Mac series. Today we’ll have a look at Finder and Spotlight, and how to combine the two to boost your productivity.

Finder

The Finder in Mac OS X is the equivalent of Windows Explorer. It is the interface which OS X uses to display files and directories and is what you would use to manage your files—copy, move, burn them to CD, etc.

While this article series is written for beginners, I’m going to skip the absolute basics of Finder and instead share some less obvious features and tips of the Finder. Ready? Here we go.

Customising the Finder window

A great way to increase your productivity is to customise the Finder window to suit your work style. For starters, have a look at the Finder Preferences (⌘,) and View Options (⌘J). You can find them under the Finder and View menus in the menu bar.

By default, OS X only shows icon representations of images in Finder’s icon view

My favourite customisation is to show icon previews and item info in the Finder’s icon view. By default, OS X displays only icon representations of pictures in the Finder.

Show picture previews, dimensions and increase their icon size in Finder’s View Options

Show previews of pictures and their dimensions right within Finder by enabling these options inside the View Options palette. For good measure, increase the icon size to give you a better view too. You can choose to apply these changes on a per folder basis as well.

Burning files with Finder

Finder can also burn files to CD or DVD for you. First, insert an empty disc. A dialog box will pop up. Choose ‘Open Finder’ and a new Finder window will open. Drag the files you want to burn into the window. OS X creates aliases of those files in the CD, leaving your original files untouched, before burning them. Click ‘Burn’ when you are ready to burn them to disc.

Burn files with Finder directly to disc or through Burn Folders

Alternatively, you can create a Burn Folder by choosing File -> New Burn Folder in the Finder menu. When you’re ready to burn the files in the Burn Folder to a disc, click ‘Burn’. A Burn Folder is useful if you are collecting files you want to archive over time, e.g. you may want to set aside project files to be burnt to disc while you are still in the middle of your project.

Spotlight

We’ll now turn our attention to Spotlight, Mac OS X’s built-in desktop search that Apple introduce in OS X 10.4 Tiger. Spotlight for Mac OS X takes advantage of rich metadata—data about the file, as opposed to data within the file—and can even search based on the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size and many more details.

Search everywhere

Launch Spotlight quick search in the right of the menu bar by pressing ⌘Space, or launch the Spotlight window with ⌘⌥Space (Command+Option+Space). Besides these two common Spotlight interfaces, you can also perform a spotlight search in the following places.

Spotlight shortcut: Search for the name of the destination folder within Save panels

• Open and Save panels—useful if you can’t remember the location of the file you want to work on, or if you’re just plain lazy to navigate to where you want to save a new one.
• Finder windows—every Finder window has a Spotlight search field in the upper right corner. It’s so ubiquitous sometimes we forget!
• Right-click contextual menus—select a word and right-click and then choose ‘Search in Spotlight’. (Works only for Cocoa applications e.g. Safari).
• Services menu—select a word and then choose ‘Spotlight’ from Services under the active application’s menu.

Spotlight “kind” and “date” keywords

If you are looking for a specific type of information, you can narrow the scope of your search by using the following keywords.

Spotlight “kind” Keyword List
Applications	kind:application, kind:applications, kind:app
Contacts	kind:contact, kind:contacts
Folders	kind:folder, kind:folders
Email	kind:email, kind:emails, kind:mail message, kind:mail messages
iCal Events	kind:event, kind:events
iCal To Dos	kind:todo, kind:todos, kind:to do, kind:to dos
Images	kind:image, kind:images
Movies	kind:movie, kind:movies
Music	kind:music
Audio	kind:audio
PDF	kind:pdf, kind:pdfs
Preferences	kind:system preferences, kind:preferences
Bookmarks	kind:bookmark, kind:bookmarks
Fonts	kind:font, kind:fonts
Presentations	kind:presentations, kind:presentation

So, for example, if I wanted to search for the iLounge iPod book I downloaded last week, I could simply type “ipod kind:pdf” so that Spotlight will only show me PDFs about iPods.

Spotlight can also filter searches by date. Using the following keywords will return documents opened in the date range, or appointments and to-dos with deadlines in the date range.

Spotlight “date” Keyword List
date:this month date:this week date:this year date:today date:yesterday	date:tomorrow date:next month date:next week date:next year

Smart Folders

Great, now you’ve learnt about some features of Finder and Spotlight. Time to put the two together and flex OS X’s muscles with Smart Folders.

A Smart Folder is essentially a set of files grouped together based on the criteria of a Spotlight search. Smart Folders can fundamentally change the way you organise your files because files can now live in more than one folder at a time! Smart Folders are useful for displaying a constantly updating list of files, e.g. a list of all Word documents modified in the last week, or photos taken by your Canon camera that are larger than 3 megapixels.

Sounds complicated I know, but it will get clearer if you try it out on your own. Here’s an example of how I keep track of my favourite stock pictures with Smart Folders.

OS X makes creating powerful Smart Folders easy with a simple interface

First I create a Smart Folder by choosing File -> New Smart Folder from the Finder menu bar. The Smart Folder includes all files in my home folder by default, so I change it to only show me files from the correct folder by clicking ‘Others…’ and navigating to my Stock Pictures folder. Then I change the search criteria from Kind to Color Label and choose Green. Since that’s all I need for my Smart Folder I can click the minus sign on the second search criteria to delete it. Now I can save my Favourite Stock Pictures Smart Folder to the Desktop.

Now here’s where the magic is. I can easily add pictures to my Favourite Stock Pictures Smart Folder by right-clicking (control-click) them and then give them a Green color label.

Shortlist all my favourite stock pictures by giving them a Green label

Now I can open my Favourite Stock Pictures Smart Folder and voila! The images I labeled earlier show up inside. The images in this Smart Folder are still in their original location, but they also show up here because they match the search criteria which I specified for the Smart Folder. I can now add more images to this Smart Folder by applying Green labels to files in my Stock Pictures folder. If I change my mind, I can clear the color label and the file will disappear from my Favourite Stock Pictures.

Hopefully that demonstration gives you an idea of the power of Smart Folders. Combined with Spotlight comments and other search criteria, Smart Folders can dramatically change the way you work on your Mac. Some other ideas for Smart Folder uses include:

• Track files that need to be edited or worked on (example)
• Watch your mail attachments folder for all attachments that arrived today—saves you from looking through your Mail!
• Group project files with Spotlight comments
• Find all media files of a certain codec—MPEG, H.264, etc

Further reading

Spotlight metadata and Smart Folders are a powerful new way to organise your Mac’s files. My example above, using labels, just scratches the surface of what you can do with your Mac. If you’d like to find out more, I would suggest reading the Spotlight tips page on Apple’s website. Also, Nick Santilli of The Apple Blog has posted a great series of articles and screencast on how he uses Smart Folders and Spotlight comments as “tags” to organise his Mac (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

I hope this article has shown you some of the features below the surface of the Finder and Spotlight and make you want to find out more. Till Part 3 of the Switch to Mac series!