Using Search in Finder

Are you searching for a file name or content. If you enter a term and hit return, it searches both.

When you enter a search term, a list of potential match tokens appear. If you are just wanting to search for file names, choose Filename contains. You can also form a search like this: name: potato and hit return. It will change it to use the name contains search token.

"contains" in this case is a misnomer. It is actually searching for matches which are essentially the beginning of words. If the search is potato, it will find Tomato_potato, but not Tomatopotato. You can find parts of words by using the search criteria with name contains as opposed to name matches. Doesn't make any sense but they haven't changed it in forever.

See Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support

Use keywords to narrow your search. Let's say you want to find a 4-page PDF that you know was created sometime after June 2024 and has a red tag on it:

kind:pdf created:>06/01/2024 pages:4 tag:red

That reduces the files that are searched.

Same deal but you remember the PDF filename also had "foo" in the filename:

kind:pdf created:>06/01/2024 pages:4 tag:red name:foo



Staynavytom wrote:

When I'm looking for a file in Finder using Search in the toolbar, I get a list of what seems like all of my files regardless of the search term. How do I limit the search parameters?

It's the modern theory of search. Google uses the same system. The idea is to always keep you searching, but never finding.

By default, everything in a file is indexed. So if your search term is found in 200,000 files, that's the result you will get. If you carefully add words, you can narrow the search to only files that match both words. If you have things that are particularly important, you can add your own metadata like tags.