The phrase repeated throughout WWDC was ‘semantic search’. How does fit in with Spotlight, and how could it benefit those who aren’t so enthused by advanced AI?
Spotlight
Many document formats store metadata with their data. Choosing the right ones to use must ensure their access, indexing and search. Here’s how to check those, and why Keywords are usually a good choice.
Spotlight can’t index the contents of document versions to make them searchable. How you can change that and save having to browse those versions when you need to recover old content.
Spotlight fails to index the content of text files starting with odd characters like ‘LG’ and ‘Draw’, Although we understand this is caused by checking the file type using file(1), this suggests an explanation of why it should do that. And whether it will ever get fixed for Intel Macs.
If generating QuickLook thumbnails and previews, and indexing metadata for Spotlight, depend on UTIs, how come they tolerate misleading file extensions? A simple practical demo.
You realise that a few hours ago you trashed an important file by accident. How can you search your Time Machine backups without looking through them one at a time?
Soon after introducing iCloud and iCloud Drive, Apple changed the way most metadata was handled to ensure it was synced up to the cloud. Recently this has been reversed, and little metadata is now synced. Was this an accident or intentional? What is the workaround?
Traces the path of metadata from inside a PDF document and its extended attributes, to those in Spotlight’s indexes and displayed in the Finder. Only a third survived that journey.
This new version adds a drag-and-drop window to inspect the metadata of files using mdimport and mdls.
A summary of iCloud Drive syncing of attributes, data, extended attributes, document versions (complex), Spotlight index content, and QuickLook previews.
The Eclectic Light Company 