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.
Spotlight
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.
Use the mdimport and mdls commands to dump full information about all the metadata attributes found for a file, and those indexed by Spotlight.
Two significant indexing errors when processing RTF and image files caused search failures. Display in the Finder is also insufficient to make these xattrs as useful as they could be.
Although easy to add to documents, Finder comments work strangely, and can prove fragile. They can also be used to conceal malicious code by steganography, but there are better options.
Spotlight indexes on-the-fly so new and changed files are quickly searchable, but periodically needs to assimilate those into its more static indexes. That and Live Text extraction are run following startup.
If you don’t want any of their services, you can turn Siri off in its settings, and disable indexing and search in Spotlight settings. Or you can use mdutil, if you know its limitations.
Will now list apps installed on systems running with primary languages other than English. Problems resulted from unexpected behaviour of Spotlight and search with mdfind, as explained here in detail.
How to exclude folders and files from these services, with new problems apparent in macOS Tahoe over exclusions from Time Machine backups.
The Eclectic Light Company 