Spotlight is not indexing as it should, how do I refresh my spotlight indexing

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

If searching your Mac doesn’t return expected results, rebuilding the Spotlight index might help.

1. Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences, then click Spotlight.
2. Click the Privacy tab.
3. Drag the folder or disk that you want to index again to the list of locations that Spotlight is prevented from searching. Or click the Add (+) button and select the folder or disk to add.
4. To add an item to the Privacy tab, you must have ownership permissions for that item. To learn about permissions, choose Help from the Finder menu bar, then search for “permissions.”
5. From the same list of locations, select the folder or disk that you just added. Then click the Remove (–) button to remove it from the list.
6. Quit System Preferences. Spotlight will reindex the contents of the folder or disk.

If still not working...

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

Manually Rebuilding Spotlight via Terminal

If the aforementioned Spotlight control panel approach doesn’t spur a reindexation of the drive, you may need to initiate it manually through the command line. Open Terminal and use the following command string to do so:

sudo mdutil -E /

This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.

If still need be…

Open Terminal and run each of these one at a time

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network

killall Dock

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.

Many things can cause Spotlight to misbehave. For instance, it refuses to index a clone — a drive that has been duplicated with a utility such as  SuperDuper. To fix the problem, you need to deal with two invisible files on the problem drive. To toggle them visible/invisible type Shift-CMD-period at any time.

Step 1. Delete this file: .metadata_never_index_unless_rootfs. You will see it in the drive’s root (top) level.

Step 2. Edit this file: VolumeConfiguration.plist. You will see it inside the folder named /.Spotlight-V100. Use a text editor (NOT a word processor!) such as BBEdit or TextEdit to replace these lines

	<key>Exclusions</key>
	<array>
		<string>/</string>
	</array>

with these lines:

	<key>Exclusions</key>
	<array/>
	<key>Options</key>

Save and close the file.

Step 3. Eject the drive, then remount it. (System reads these files only once, at the time of mounting.)

Performing Step 1 without Step 2 has no effect. 

Performing Step 2 without Step 1 has no effect. 

To check for success, launch Terminal, and issue this command:

sudo mdutil -a -i on /

It will report which drives have Spotlight enabled and which do not.

👍