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What advantages to spotlight on external drives?

What advantages are there to Spotlight (MacOS) automatic indexing of new/external drives?


I ask because it seems to do this for every external device, at times it prevents me from doing work. For example, on an external SD Card, there is no disk icon present on the desktop and there doesn't appear to be a manual way to simply exclude the device entry (ie: /dev/disk4). So I want to understand what the advantages are of this automatic indexing.


Posted on Jun 1, 2021 9:19 AM

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Posted on Jun 1, 2021 10:19 AM

The advantage is that Spotlight can find stuff in those drives once it has indexed them.


If you want to add any drive to the privacy list, you can click the + button and then select from the Sidebar.

And if you want those drives to show on the desktop, make sure to check the relevant boxes in Finder preferences:

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Question marked as Best reply

Jun 1, 2021 10:19 AM in response to Forrest

The advantage is that Spotlight can find stuff in those drives once it has indexed them.


If you want to add any drive to the privacy list, you can click the + button and then select from the Sidebar.

And if you want those drives to show on the desktop, make sure to check the relevant boxes in Finder preferences:

What advantages to spotlight on external drives?

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