Spotlight – How to Search Multiple Spotlight Sources/Drives Simultaneously?

spotlight

I have my files spread between the main drive and a volume that is mounted most of the time. Spotlight is enabled and properly indexing both of them.

When searching through the top right spotlight menu, only results from the drive show up.

When searching from a finder window, I get two options in the header for where to search "This Mac" or "My Volume". "This Mac" (the default) only shows results from the drive, while "My Volume" only shows results from the volume…

How can I get all results, across both the drive and the mounted volume, to show up in a single list?

[I should mention that for merged results limited to filename searches a solution could be to use an app called Alfred. However Alfred doesn't apply search queries to file contents as does the regular spotlight search.]

Best Answer

You can use HoudahSpot to search multiple locations.

HoudahSpot is an advanced front-end to Spotlight. It lets you build complex queries to search metadata stored in the Spotlight index.

In the HoudahSpot "Query Pane" you will find a "Where…" section. Here you can specify which locations / drives / folders to search. There is also an "Exclude…" section where you can specify folders to ignore. E.g. you could search your Home folder, but ignore results from the ~/Library folder.

Full disclosure: I am the developer of HoudahSpot

Related Solutions

Why doesn’t iPhoto show up in Spotlight search results

Try rebuild index

From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
Click Spotlight.
Click the Privacy tab.
Drag a folder or an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
If prompted for confirmation, click OK.
Remove the item or volume you just added to the list by clicking
it and then clicking the minus ("-") button.
Close Spotlight preferences.
Spotlight will re-index the contents of the folder or volume.

You can also use the command line to rebuild Spotlight’s index.
Open the Terminal application and enter the following command:

sudo mdutil -E /

Authenticate with your administrator password,
and a message appears indicating that the index will be rebuilt.
Spotlight rebuilds the index of your hard disk.
You can track the rebuilding progress by clicking the Spotlight menu.

MacOS – Search a folder that is excluded from Spotlight

If you're happy with the terminal you can use the find command.

Something like opening Terminal in Utilities.

cd <folder name>
find . -name <whatever you're searching for>

Once found you can open it up with open

So, I can do something like:

alex@smiley:~|⇒  cd Desktop
alex@smiley:~/Desktop|⇒  find . -name Mac*
./Mac Pro.spx
alex@smiley:~/Desktop|⇒  open Mac\ Pro.spx

Notice that I used the * as a wildcard to match all files starting with Mac

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Why doesn’t iPhoto show up in Spotlight search results

MacOS – Search a folder that is excluded from Spotlight

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