[X4U] Thoughts on Spotlight?

[Neil Cadsawan]

On Apr 30, 2005, at 2:05 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:


> Does anyone have any thoughts about how useful Spotlight is, or any  
> tips on using it?
>
> I must confess, so far I'm totally unimpressed, although at the  
> same time I wasn't very excited about it to start with.
>
>         Zane
>

The cool thing about Spotlight is how well it works in combination  
with other new features in Tiger such as Automator, Smart Folders and  
Tiger's new implementation of meta data.

Yes, Spotlight can find files and such based on simple criteria (i.e.  
dates, names, file types, etc.) but it's true power comes when you're  
searching for items based on their meta data.  Images that are cmyk  
and 1024x768 for example.

One thing that's added to files, if you "get info" on an item, is an  
area called "Spotlight Comments".  It's the area just below the  
item's icon and name.  This is an area where you can add your own  
meta data to the item.  Let's say you have a group of files for a  
project at work.  These files consist of images, documents, movies,  
sound files, anything and everything.  Spotlight won't find all the  
files for a project, unless perhaps you name them all with a specific  
word.  But what you can do is enter information into this "Spotlight  
Comments" area to give them more meaningful information.

What Tiger doesn't do well is let you select a group of items and let  
you edit this information directly from this selection. I expect that  
happen in a future update.  If you "get info" on all these items as  
they're selected, you get a bunch of Info windows popping up and  
would have to enter in information one by one.  Not good. But what  
Tiger does give you is Automator.  With Automator, you can create an  
action that will give all these various files "Spotlight Comments" in  
one fell swoop.  To make it even easier, you can save this Automator  
action as a menu script, or even better, a folder action.

Now with our hypothetical project, once we either create a new file,  
or are emailed a related file for this project, we can just drop in  
on a folder with folder actions attached, and Automator will "tag"  
all the files with the specified meta data.

Now... getting back to Spotlight... When you perform a search for  
files related to this project, you can just search for words you  
entered as "Spotlight Comments", and all these various files appear  
in your Spotlight results.  That is the power of Spotlight.  Throw in  
a smart folder that contains this same "Spotlight Comments" criteria,  
and you've got a folder that now contains all these files, no matter  
where they live on your hard drive.


-Neil Cadsawan