With the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Spotlight was certainly a substantial part of the upgrade that received a lot of attention, and with good reason. Once you have incorporated Spotlight into your daily Mac life, going back to locating things on your computer the ‘old way’ is next to impossible. As great as Spotlight is, the vast majority of users only scratch the surface in in really putting Spotlight to work for you.
Today’s tip deals with Spotlight “kind” Keywords which are extremely easy to use and helps to filter the results more to your needs. Normally, a Spotlight search returns anything even remotely relevant, regardless of what type of file format it happens to reside in. Using the Spotlight “kind” Keywords, you can easily narrow down your search results into just the formats that you care about.
If you know that you are looking for specific types of information, you can specify that in your search phrase by adding the text “kind:<type of information> after your search. For example, to find all of the PDF documents related to Yosemite, type “Yosemite kind:PDF” in to Spotlight. This example uses the kind type but Apple provides a fairly comprehensive list of kind types for your use. (see below). Trust me, once you’ve started using the kind keywords, Spotlight becomes far more useful than it was out of the box.
| Spotlight “kind” Keyword List | |
|---|---|
| Applications | kind:application, kind:applications, kind:app |
| Contacts | kind:contact, kind:contacts |
| Folders | kind:folder, kind:folders |
| kind:email, kind:emails, kind:mail message, kind:mail messages | |
| iCal Events | kind:event, kind:events |
| iCal To Dos | kind:todo, kind:todos, kind:to do, kind:to dos |
| Images | kind:image, kind:images |
| Movies | kind:movie, kind:movies |
| Music | kind:music |
| Audio | kind:audio |
| kind:pdf, kind:pdfs | |
| Preferences | kind:system preferences, kind:preferences |
| Bookmarks | kind:bookmark, kind:bookmarks |
| Fonts | kind:font, kind:fonts |
| Presentations | kind:presentations, kind:presentation |
Teach Spotlight to Search Your Way
With the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Spotlight was certainly a substantial part of the upgrade that received a lot of attention, and with good reason. Once you have incorporated Spotlight into your daily Mac life, going back to locating things on y…