All you need to know about the main services in iCloud, the limits imposed on them by Apple, and how access to them can be controlled.
Spotlight
When you start your Mac up, the fans blow full on, and you see CGPDFServices taking lots of CPU %. Is this malware? No, but it’s new in Sonoma.
Searching the text content of PDF documents often doesn’t work well, sometimes not at all. And recovering what you can see is text can also fail miserably.
Does macOS use Live Text to extract and index recognisable text in images? Is that a good or bad thing if it did? What about PDFs?
The most accessible of any metadata in the Finder and apps, Finder tags can be ideal for classifying files and folders into no more than 7 categories. Here’s how they work.
Version 1.3 adds drag and drop onto a document window, and a Scratchpad to store keywords that you use often. For 10.14.6 and later.
Second beta adds support for all metadata keys, has an extensive Help book, and saves results in a text file. Discover the keywords you can search for.
Does Sonoma analyse and classify your images? What content does it obtain from them? How to discover what search terms it recognises? And could this be used to detect CSAM?
Automated image analysis and other tools store keywords in many different types of files. To search effectively for keywords, though, you need to know which terms have been used.
It can take many hours for files to be downloaded from iCloud. Apps must be able to cope with that, but how well does macOS?
The Eclectic Light Company 