I understand there is a dropdown menu in the spotlight search to select "Filenames" in spotlight, but is there a way to make this your default when searching?
MacOS – Can you search Filenames in Spotlight as opposed to all metadata and contents by default
macossearchspotlight
Related Solutions
You can use this in your search to search for files with 'query' in their name: name:query
For more info about Spotlight commands, you can take a look at an excerpt of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual.
- Open a finder window
- Open the folder you wish to search in
- Click in the search box
- Type the text you want to find
- A dropdown should appear like the one in the image below which allows you to select the 'Filename contains' option
If you've already run the search and want to alter the search to only look for files with your search term in the filename, you can click the '+' button just beneath the search box and change the search type from there. See screenshots below:
Mike Scott has nice suggestions from the comments that are worth incorporating here to use the name: selector in spotlight.
You can prefix your search with name: as shown below
This results in a window which you can select 'Filename' or 'Everything' from if you click the button labelled 'name' in the search box as shown below:
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Best Answer
Apple has search keys, so it's not changing a default, but it does let you specify file names (here they would contain the string "test"):