Find Filter Not Working

That search criteria is based on the kMDItemFSNodeCount metadata.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to get updated often, if at all.

The find command in Terminal can show you empty folders, but there are quite a few of them in my home. You might want to have it start searching in the top level of where the folders are stored.

find ~/ -type f -empty

You can modify the find command to delete those found items, but as it returns many more folders than you probably would like to delete, I don't think it is advisable.

Update: I forced Spotlight to reindex my home folder and it appears the metadata was updated.

You could try adding the top-level folder to Spotlight Privacy tab, then remove it. Wait a while (5 minutes, maybe) for it to update the index and try again.

I have created two empty folders on my Desktop named Xray and Zed. I can find both with the following construct:

I know that an empty folder has a zero node count, and its kMDItemFSSize is reported as (null), so I leave the file size above empty to represent null. I have clicked in and out of the folder a couple of times hoping that the Finder would deposit the hidden .DS_Store file there and determine how that affects the search. So far, over 10 minutes it has not done that.

One of the overlooked issues with using the Finder to detect empty folders is that even if there are currently no user files in a given folder, it is very likely that the Finder has placed a hidden Apple Desktop Services Store (.DS_Store) file in the folder. Thus, a folder (unless just created in UNIX) will rarely be found as truly empty. Neither Spotlight, the Finder's Find command, or even the command-line find -type d -empty syntax will report an empty folder when it contains a .DS_Store file.

If you want to report a folder empty that contains one of these .DS_Store files, it will have to be done programmatically. That is about 8 lines of code.

I think you meant the following:

find ˜/ -type d -empty

but in my other thread, it would be:

The problem isn't that it can't find the ones that are empty.

The problem is it finds ones that are not empty, too. That seems to be caused by the metadata not getting updated.

Add a file to one of those and see if your metadata updates to indicate the correct number of items. Mine doesn't.

I copied a 2.7 MB JPG into the Xray folder. Spotlight is definitely drunk, as it failed to update the kMDItemFSNodeCount or kMDItemFSSize after several minutes. A Get Info does report that the folder size has increased to 2.7 MB.

Doesn’t really matter what hardware you have if the software is generating the information. You could be running billions and billions of teraflops, but that won’t generate any more data then what is provided by the OS

Yes.