spotlight and RAW files

Spotlight will find things with metadata entries, not all the EXIF things are made into metadata entries however. I think the best you can do is something like this:

Kind is images all

Name contains CRW
(or whatever extension your camera uses for its raw files, mine happens to be a Canon, and raw files have the .CRW extension)

Created date is after 11/7/2006

Hope that works. It does for me.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Afraid mine doesn't have that information in the metadata, therefore it is not indexed by Spotlight. To see exactly which EXIF data has made it into the metadata for the file you can use Terminal. Launch Terminal from your Utilities folder, then type this:

mdls

a space, and drag the file into the Terminal window and drop it. You will see all the metadata entries for that file. It will look something like this:

NoobiX:~ francine$ mdls /Users/francine/Pictures/CRWs/CRW_2815.CRW
kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2007-03-14 14:26:56 -0700
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2007-03-14 14:26:56 -0700
kMDItemContentType = "com.canon.crw-raw-image"
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
"com.canon.crw-raw-image",
"public.camera-raw-image",
"public.image",
"public.data",
"public.item",
"public.content"
)
kMDItemDisplayName = "CRW_2815.CRW"
kMDItemFinderComment = "width/height: 2592 x 1944 "

and so on. If there is no entry for focal length, then you are out of luck. My camera's raw format is not supported in Leopard, so the raw file entries are pretty general. With jpegs the metadata includes Aperture and FNumber and FocalLength. You can only search for things that are included in the metadata.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

You can create a smart filter in Finder. Select 'Other' from the search criteria drop down, and you can select just about any data item, including focal length. Very useful feature. No terminal required.

As Andre says, Focal lenght is one of the items you can adde to your search criteria. Click the plus button at the end of your previous criterion, from the drop down menu select "Other" and from the list that appears select Focal lenght, then select "equals" (or greater than or less than) and type in the number. Click the Save button to save your search for future use.

The use of the Terminal was only to determine exactly what metadata were included in oesse's files. Saves frustration--if your files don't have something, it won't be indexed, and thus a Spotlight search won't find anything. Just because the option is available in Spotlight doesn't mean it will necessarily work for files you have. Focal length returns NO results on my raw files, but it does on the JPEGs.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder