There are some topics that invariably generate comments from those who have either abandoned a major feature in macOS, or are struggling with it. Some of the most persistent are problems with Spotlight, particularly with its local search of files on your Mac. To help grapple with those, four years ago I added some Spotlight tests to Mints that can be used to work out where those problems are occurring. I’m delighted now to offer an extension to those in a whole new app, perhaps predictably named SpotTest.

Spotlight is so substantial, almost silent in the log, and impenetrable that the best approach to diagnosing its problems is to test it out in a controlled way. Mints has been doing that by creating a folder of files containing an unusual word, then searching for that. Although that’s still useful for a quick test, we need something more focused and flexible, and that’s what SpotTest aims to deliver.

Following deep dives into how Spotlight indexes and searches metadata and contents of files, and how it can search text extracted from images and the results of image analysis, I’ve realised that different test files are required, together with alternative means of search. For example, the standard approach used in compiled apps, with NSMetadataQuery, is incapable of finding content tags obtained using Visual Look Up, which only appear when using the mdfind command. SpotTest takes these into account.

There are now 15 carefully crafted test files, of which one cannot currently be found, no matter what method of search you try.

A perfect 13/15 result from NSMetadataQuery is only possible after waiting a day or more for background mediaanalysisd processing to recognise and extract the text in file I, a PNG image. The other 12 here should all be found when running this test a few seconds after the test files have been created. They rely on a range of mdimporter modules bundled in macOS, apart from file L, an XML property list.

Another of SpotTest’s tools will list the mdimporters used for each of the test files.

Run the search using the mdfind command within SpotTest and, once mediaanalysisd has done its image recognition, you should get a perfect 14/15.

The only current limitation of SpotTest version 1.0 is that it can only run tests on the Data volume that your Mac started up from, using a folder at the top level of your Home folder. A future version will let you test other volumes as well. Its Help book runs to nine pages: please read them, as its test might seem deceptively simple but provide a lot of useful information about how Spotlight local search is functioning. Coupled with log extracts using LogUI it should shine light in the darkness.

SpotTest 1.1, which requires macOS 14.6 or later, is now available from here: spottest11
and from its new place in its Product Page.

I wish you successful searching.