10 Advanced File Search Techniques

hi this is gary with macmost.com today let's look at 10 useful advanced file search techniques [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so when you do a file search in finder by default it will search for the name or contents of the file but you can get much more advanced than that let's start off here with a simple search for a name now you can use the search field here at the top right or you can use command f which is the shortcut for file find to open up a new window or tab and start a search now if i search for something up here like test that i'm going to come up with files that match either the name or the contents notice some of these files don't have that in the name it's because this word is in the contents of the file instead if i go down here to file names contains test you'll see it changes here to say name and i'm searching just for the name so all of the results here have that in the name i can click here and then change that to everything to search for name and the contents a shortcut for that is simply to type name colon and then whatever you want and this will search just for the name and i don't even have to select this once i do you can see it just converts it to that now alternatively i can not type anything up here at all and i can go right to the search criteria here note the very first thing is the search scope so you can set it to the entire mac or just the location you started in if you want to customize that go to finder preferences and then under when performing a search you can set it to default to search this mac search the current folder or return to the previous folder you were searching in the last search that you did now it's going to give you the default criteria kind as any you think then that it would then give you results that would include every file this location but by convention here it's just going to not show you anything it's going to assume kind as any then relates to whatever you're searching up here but if you were to change this to something else it would then give you the results so for instance if i did kinda's image i'd get the images there now let's focus on searching by name if i select name here then i could just as before do a search but i have more advanced features here i could do name matches or name contains notice that name contains is a different search this one for instance here finds t e s period t and matches to that so there's some slight differences between these two you could also do begins with or ends with like that you could also do is for an exact match so only files that are exactly this and if you wanted to you could do is not so now i get the results of every file that's not with that now you could change from name to all sorts of other things so one thing you can select is kind and you can then set it to anything other than any and it will give a result so for instance all of the images but notice that this goes an extra level deep in some cases for instance kinda's image allows you then to select the type of image so i could say i just want jpegs or i just want pngs and notice here that when i had all selected it had psds photoshop documents as an option but i didn't see psd right there i can go to kind is other and then i could type something in here so if i want to look for photoshop documents i could type photoshop now what is that matching exactly well if i select a file here and i do command i i can see here kind and it's looking right here for the match so for instance if i were to search for a document here you would wonder what qualify something as a document well it's simple if you select it and get info you can see in this case kind is pages document so it's taking that word from the kind there and matching it so if i did psd here you can see it comes out with nothing because that doesn't match kind i could instead do name and then ends with to match those now what if you do want to match the contents not the name so you know some words are used somewhere in the document instead of name you can go to contents and this will ignore the name and simply look for things that have this word somewhere in the contents of the document usually these will be text documents things with the word actually written in there but sometimes they can be found in other types of documents if the app that created it actually stores words like maybe text over an image in such a way that it can be found by spotlight now a lot of other things you're going to find if you choose other here it's going to come up with a whole list of things that you can search for however most of these just apply to one particular application or another for instance a lot of these have to do with music files and there are things about like the composer other things have to do with photos taken by a camera so they've got things like aperture and exposure and all of that so for instance let's go into the documents folder here and then let's go into projects and select a file like this one here i can use command i and i can see tags right up here and i can add a tag so let's add a tag called work to this now if i return to a search i can search for that tag let me do other and then i'm going to search here for tags and then do work and it will show up now sometimes it can get confusing because of instead of tags if i had maybe discovered keywords i would think maybe this is tags in the finder and you can see it comes up with nothing if i actually search the entire mac and you can see it comes up with a bunch of things here what's all this about well here's some stock photography for instance if i do command i with it i can see here under more info work is actually a keyword in there that's part of the file it's part of the metadata describing what's in this file it's not the tag that i add up here myself so this would be something created in the graphics app that made this image you run into the same thing here if you go and look for comments so you've got comments about this item so if i look for comment matches that and i look here i can see there is indeed keywords where from a whole bunch of other metadata and that's somewhere there in that metadata on the other hand if i were to go to a file like before and add something here to the comments then i would search and find that not using comment but instead using spotlight comment so you can see spotlight comment matches work comes up with that file another useful one that you can do is fonts so you can look for fonts used in this item let's do that so font matches let's say i'm looking for arial and i can see here some documents that have that font and there's a lot of them including the font itself so i may want to add another criteria here that says kind is and then document and now i can see all the documents that use this it could be useful if you find some sort of third party font on your mac and you want to decide whether or not you should get rid of it you can see which documents are currently using that font just make sure you're searching either this mac or some area that's going to have all the documents that you want to find another useful one is pages so pages search for the number of pages in a document so normally you want to do is greater than and let's say how many documents do i have that more than 100 pages so here's a whole bunch of them more than 500 pages so there's a bunch here so it's an alternate way to look for something by side i can say give me all the pdfs or all the pages documents or something where the length of the document is greater than 500 pages now one really interesting thing that you can do is you can search for applications so i can do kind as application and on this mac it's going to give me all of the apps installed that could make a little easier for spotlight by actually going to the applications folder first and then doing command f so now it's going to search just applications here and then i could say okay kind his application now the cool thing is that you could do more than that because you can add another criteria i search for app i come up with category app store category so let's go into that and i can say category matches and let's say games productivity or let's say graphics and this could be one of those things that's really good if you save it and create a saved search for it let's call it graphics apps and then have it add to the sidebar so now i can easily find all my graphics apps anytime i want and i can actually drag that to the right side of the dock and now i have all my graphics apps here now like that pages one i showed you before there's a way to search for folders that have certain number of items in them so we could do kindness folder but only folders are going to show up in this result anyway so now we could do folder and say number of items there it is and we could say the number of items is greater than and i could say one thousand so here are the folders on my mac that have more than a thousand items in them and you can also search for images that have a certain width height or total pixel count so let's go to other here and search for pixels and we can see pixel count height or width so for instance we did count we could say pixel count is greater than and some really big number like 1 million it's going to give me all the images that have that many pixels in it 100 million so these are the largest images i've got by the number of pixels not by the actual size so compression may be making some of these smaller than my largest images but still they're the ones that would take up the most screen space but i could also do pixel width or pixel height so let's do pixel height and 4k is the equivalent to 2160 vertically so if i do that notice i'm getting a lot of videos here because i didn't say i just wanted images so let's give me any file that's got 2160 pixels in height videos and images so i could specify the kind is an image like those or i could say it's a video so this is a quick way to find all of your 4k video or anything that's 4k or greater you could also choose where so what does where do well where the item came from so if you've downloaded files you can find the files that came from a certain site so i can use adobe to find all of the ones that i downloaded from adobe's stock photography site that i use so i can see all of these here if i select a file i do command i you'll even see here under more info it says where from and it's giving me the full url to it and that url of course includes adobe which is why it matches this i want to throw in a few more tips here notice this list the top stays the same and this one shows me things i've recently used but if there's one that you find useful like for instance pixel count you can check the box here and now that one will stay here at the top part also if you want to search by name for wild cards you can do it of course in most cases you can just use matches and then type something like that and get the results that you want let's say you want to do something where you could get everything that starts with the letter t it ends with st putting an asterisk there won't work no matter which one you choose is still not going to work but you can use raw query to do this and then you have to set this up with the special kmd item display name just like that capitalization counts and then do two equal signs and then in quotes put what you're looking for so this is going to find everything that matches this exactly but i can do a wild card like that and now it'll find things like themegraphics.cst that begins with a t and ends with an st so it's matching it correctly if you include the letter c after the quote like that then it won't care about case so it'll match things with a capital t like these here at the bottom now there's a lot more to explore under others especially if you're using media files images sounds videos things like that there are a lot of different ways that you can search for those items and of course there's a lot of standard stuff to be found in here like for instance you could do a search by modified date you can choose the range how it works do something like before a certain day or within the last days weeks months years so if you're interested in more advanced searches just dig into this and spend the time to try all the different features out hope you found this useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out you

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 1,826

Keywords: mac finder searches, mac file find, mac find file, mac file searches, mac file search by

Id: aRKuYUiO1EE

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021