OS X: Another Way to Reset the Spotlight-Indicies

Spotlight is a feature in OS X which allows me to be much more productive in my writing-endeavors. I use a folder on my Mac to store all thoughts, ideas, possible openings for books, etc. The folder does contain a certain structure of sub-folders, but most of the time—when in need for inspiration—I simply use Spotlight to wade through the material. So far, so good.

I recently discovered, that Spotlight couldn't find a certain file I was sure I had created a couple of days ago. The obvious choice would be the command

sudo mdutil -E /

to reset the indices, but not everyone feels like using the Terminal-program (and I did not want to wait for Spotlight to re-index all my harddisks) so I tried something different. I opened the Spotlight-Preferences and switched to the "Privacy"-Tab



If you drag a folder, or even a hard-disk-icon into this list, Spotlight excludes the object(s) in this list from indexing and searching. You might ask, "and this is useful because … ?" It's not the excluding, it's the removal from the exclusion-list. If you remove an object from the list, Spotlight re-indexes the object in question.

So there you have it, selective rebuilding of Spotlights indices, give it a try.

Technorati Tags: OS X, Spotlight, Spotlight Index, Spotlight index rebuild