spotlight fundamentally broken in leopard?

Question

spotlight fundamentally broken in leopard?

Hi All,

I just got a new MacBook Pro after my old PowerBook G4 died the other day. My user account was migrated from 10.4.11 to this new leopard 10.5.1 machine. I tried testing spotlight by searching for a picture I knew was in my Pictures folder. Now this picture is called "thing.jpg" and the spotlight comment in the info for this file is "picture of thing during some event". Yet when I search in spotlight for "thing"... it doesn't show up. Now, I've reindex the drive twice with mdutil and still, this file refuses to show in the spotlight listings. I'm very confused. :-/

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Dec 29, 2007 8:56 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

joeuu

Level 5

5,089 points

Dec 29, 2007 9:00 PM in response to squirrelmancer

It takes a little getting used to:

_ http://db.tidbits.com/article/9283_

Joe

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Answer 2

Dec 29, 2007 9:16 PM in response to joeuu

according to that article putting "comment:thing" in the search field should yield that file as a result which it doesn't and "filename:thing" doesn't work either only "filename:thing.jpg" which I feel is totally useless! now, maybe I'm missing something fundamental here, but this search feature is supposed to be intuitive and I'm starting to find it anything but. If I wanted a fancy search language I'd stick with grep on the command line.

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Answer 3

Dec 29, 2007 10:32 PM in response to squirrelmancer

oh goodie!!!

i had to change the spotlight comments... save them... open the info panel back up... change the comments back... save again

before i did that mdls wasn't reporting any comments for the file... after... it did.

it looks like there's a major bug here, where the comments are being reindex if they were migrated from another machine. guess who'll be filing a bug report? 🙂

thanks for the help, it pointed me in a better direction.

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