When I use the regular command F in the finder to search for files, the computer will not pick up on files that I have a capital letter. Is there a way to fix this?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.1
So I followed the recommendation of someone to open Spotlight preferences in the system settings. Then hit the button > search privacy> at the bottom right. Then add your hard drive to the list by hearing the plus button and selecting it. Then remove it by hitting the minus button after selecting it. Apparently, this forces the computer to rebuild the files organization. It takes a little bit of time, although you don't see any process ongoing, but it made quite a difference in the ability of the search engine to find things.
So I followed the recommendation of someone to open Spotlight preferences in the system settings. Then hit the button > search privacy> at the bottom right. Then add your hard drive to the list by hearing the plus button and selecting it. Then remove it by hitting the minus button after selecting it. Apparently, this forces the computer to rebuild the files organization. It takes a little bit of time, although you don't see any process ongoing, but it made quite a difference in the ability of the search engine to find things.
Mad Nico wrote:
When I use the regular command F in the finder to search for files, the computer will not pick up on files that I have a capital letter. Is there a way to fix this?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
The default for Mac hard drive is formatted for "case-insensitive" —did you change this somewhere along the way?
A hard drive can be formatted to be case-sensitive, which means that the drive will treat files with different capitalizations as separate files.
ref: File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
If you open Disk Utility.app, select the drive you want to check, and look in the description area - if it says
"Case-sensitive" then your drive is set to be case-sensitive otherwise it is not.
I'm having the same problem. Just started yesterday afternoon. When I hit command + F, it does find emails, but can't locate most images (photos) -- even ones on my desktop, where I type the name of the photo exactly as it is.
Any suggestions would be most appreciated, but please, in a 'Mac for Dummies' format. I'm a disabled artist, and can't understand most technical terms. My mac is a 2020 Model, 27 inch screen, and the OS is Sequoia.
Thanks!
Wow me too. Command+F functionality is totally messed up after installing Sequoia. This has hamstrung my work effort. Two main issues.
1) the search of name always defaulted to "contains" but now defaults to "is". So every single time I need to reset it to "contains."
2) Previously it was always Boolian with an implicit "And". For example, if I typed "manuscript Vonnegut 1966" it would pull up anything with those three words. Now it will not. I can only type "Vonnegut" and it will pull up every file containing Vonnegut in the file name, which can be hundreds depending on the search. Adding additional search terms merely kills the search rather than finding files that contain all of them.
Really wrecking my work. Fix this Apple or I'm "peace out."
Any changes Wormboy2000? I'm able to find photos I've worked on recently, but nothing else. And I had to find those photos by searching through old folders...
This really is frustrating how Apple isn't responding.
That WORKED. Thank you so much Mad Nico -- such a burden lifted.
I can pull up anything that I'm searching for using 'command + F' after following your instructions. I didn't even check for awhile, but by mid afternoon, everything's back to normal.
Search or F command is not working on Finder
