Search for attributes

When you perform a normal Spotlight search through the 🔍 icon in the menubar, Spotlight uses its metadata indexes which include all the text in these five extended attributes. However, there is a more powerful way of harnessing them, in Finder’s Find command.

Before you can use this, add the four accessible extended attributes to the search criteria. Open a new window in the Finder, and select the Find command in the File menu. This changes the window from a normal Finder view to a Find window, in which the lowest row in the top part of the window contains search criteria, by default set to Kind is Any .

Open the popup menu containing the first part of that, Kind , and at the foot of that menu you will see the option Other… Choose that option to open the search attributes, and in that list tick the checkboxes next to Headline , Descriptions , Keywords , and Copyright . This adds them to that popup menu.

Now, you can perform Finder searches using the contents of those four extended attributes.

⚠️ There doesn’t appear to be any way to add Creator to the search attributes used here, but the other four extended attributes are fully supported. Applications which support Spotlight-based search may also offer these extended attributes in their search criteria; that varies according to the app.

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