How to exclude folders and files from these services, with new problems apparent in macOS Tahoe over exclusions from Time Machine backups.
Spotlight
Catch up on your reading with selected articles from the past year, covering security, logs, macOS generally, Spotlight in particular, and some utilities.
Why can’t some files be seen in thumbnails, or previews, but almost everything else can be seen thanks to QuickLook? And is this connected to Spotlight indexing?
A largely routine update, with a few interesting new features such as Edge Light, a security enhancement to AirDrop, and two important security fixes that have already been exploited in iOS.
Instead of logging out and back in, it’s possible to relaunch Spotlight from the Finder, as demonstrated here with the aid of the log. And it might be useful too.
When Spotlight can’t find the files you expect it to, it could be that they weren’t indexed, or that Spotlight’s search has failed to find their index entries. Here’s how to tell those apart and work out what went wrong.
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.
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.
For the last 10 years, macOS has relied on Uniform Type Identifiers to recognise different types of files, for opening in apps, QuickLook, Spotlight and in other features.
The Eclectic Light Company 