The Preview pane in Finder windows can show a comprehensive list of metadata, or a shortened list you can customise in Preview Options. Here’s how to use it and how it can provide further information.
mdimporter
Normally, the x.1 update fixes many of the bugs from the first release. But in Tahoe, a crop of fresh bugs have been included. Here are some of them, and how they have arisen.
In macOS Mojave, Apple changed the way that Spotlight indexes the contents of plain text files. That introduced a bug that prevents indexing of any of the contents of files starting with certain characters. For many Macs, that bug won’t ever be fixed.
Looks at how Spotlight adds a batch of new files to its volume indexes, and how it handles and answers queries.
Apple’s several patents cast new light on how Spotlight indexes the metadata and contents of local files, and why mds and other processes need to reindex periodically.
How Spotlight works, Core and global Spotlight, importing failure, exclusions from indexing, re-indexing, excessive re-indexing, failure to find, iCloud Drive and network shares.
You use Spotlight to search for something you’re sure is there, but it can’t find it. Here are some methods to discover why that search failed.
Immediate actions to get the best result from your search, and how to tackle even the most deep-seated of Spotlight problems.
Indexing and search diagrammed, leading to the diagnosis of problems with Spotlight, and their resolution.
Why can’t my Macs find text in Rich Text files? This explains how to diagnose the cause – which here is a bug in Big Sur’s Spotlight importer for RTF.
The Eclectic Light Company 