How to exclude certain particular files from Spotlight

finderspotlight

I know that you can exclude entire directories or files with a particular extension from Spotlight. But can I hand-pick files not to be searchable by Spotlight, preferably with a file system flag? I am a writer and keep old copies of my drafts but they muck up Spotlight with lots of search results.

Best Answer

.noindex

One of the fastest ways to hide a file or folder, from Spotlight, on the fly is to add the .noindex extension to the end of the filename or folder. The simplest way to get those files hidden is to create a folder, preferably named something innocuous, and add the extension to the end of the name. I’ll end up with a folder named “Nothing to See Here.noindex” or something similar.

Hide just a single file

hide

Select the file to be hidden. Right-click and select Get Info, or click Command+I. Find the Name & Extension field, and replace the current extension with .noindex. When prompted to confirm that I want to change the extension, I agree. Now my file is properly hidden from Spotlight search.

Finlay:

Finder won’t know what to do with my file anymore, though. Look to the drop-down labeled Open With, and select an application to handle the file. Be careful of setting a single application to handle all .noindex files, as many different file types may be hidden from Spotlight, and OS X sometimes creates .noindex files itself

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MacOS – How useful is spotlight

Spotlight shines over more traditional file search utilities because it collects and searches the metadata on files all over your computer. A Spotlight search can look into your email messages from Mail (or other clients if they support Spotlight) while also looking into the contents of a PDF you downloaded and the file names in your Documents folder at the same time. Another example is that you could search on your computer for any image that was taken in a certain location (if you have photos with GPS EXIF data) or say taken with a certain camera.

Turning off Spotlight can be done with some GUI tools (eg. Onyx or TinkerTool System) or directly from the command line using the command sudo mdutil -i off /PATH/TO/VOLUME (eg. sudo mdutil -i off / to turn off Spotlight for your startup drive).

MacOS – How to create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results

I looked at some of the saved search files in Finder's application bundle, and for example /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/MyLibraries/myDocuments.cannedSearch/search.savedSearch used a format like this for excluding directories:

<key>FXScopeArrayOfPaths</key>
<array>
  <string>~/</string>
  <string>-Library</string>
  <string>-Music/iTunes</string>
  <string>-Documents/Steam Content</string>
  <string>~/Library/Mobile Documents/</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Keynote</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Pages</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Numbers</string>
</array>

So you can exclude subfolders by adding strings that start with a minus character after a full path. Something like -~/Library doesn't seem to work.

You can edit savedSearch files by dropping them on a text editor. RawQueryDict:SearchScopes and FXScope:FXScopeArrayOfPaths seem to list the same paths by default, but just editing the second one appeared to exclude folders at least in Finder.

Best Answer

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MacOS – How useful is spotlight

MacOS – How to create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results

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