Finder not finding files that exist

Not the panacea that you may think I mean, but Finder searches are based on Spotlight indexing and there are reserved Spotlight search syntax that may prove helpful in Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support.

For instance, searching for a filename by partial name string in a Spotlight query causes it to search all selected Spotlight categories including inside documents. When I want a more efficient search, I use the name reserved word as in name:.pdf or name:foo to find PDFs or any filename that contains foo in it.

Setting the Finder Settings > Advanced panel to Searching the current folder when performing a search may also prove beneficial.

As already pointed out by Camelot, there are drive locations that are not indexed, and categories in System Settings > Spotlight that if they are unchecked will also be excluded.

I may re-index my startup drive once a year, if then, and always find what I seek.

I think you need to provide WAY more detail if you're reporting a problem that you think needs Apple Engineering attention. You're not going to get very far by just saying 'the Finder can't find a file', without more context or indicating what you're doing, what the file is, where it is, and what's actually happening.

Are you saying the file is clearly visible? Where is the file?

Is it any file? or a specific file? or files? Anything these files have in common?

Are you saying the Finder can't find the file, but you manually force a re-index and then it can? How are you initiating your index rebuild?

Ultimately, though, no one from Apple is going to hear your concern here. https://feedback.apple.com/ is the place to report such problems.

By any chance is the file on another user account?

Since I've always only ever had one user account on my Macs, I'd never thought of that one before. Naturally, I had to test it. 🙂

Created a new standard account and created one simple TextEdit file saved to the desktop named Golden Gate.

Went back to my admin account and did a search with EasyFind and OmniDiskSweeper. Neither could see the file in the test account. Which is how it's supposed to work. Users don't have access to any other user's accounts.

> because if a search comes up with nothing it leads one to believe the file is gone, right?

Unfortunately not.

All that means is that the Finder cannot find the file in the current context.

For example, the Finder will not return:

• any files in your ~/Library
• any files in system directories
• any files in hidden directories
• any files in other users' home directories
• any files you don't have permission to access
• any files embedded in packages or compound documents

Now, that's not to say there wasn't some problem that rebuilding the Spotlight index actually fixed (which seems to be the case here), but the Finder's Find is geared towards locating user-generated content that a user might reasonably search for, and not simply 'any file on disk'.

Form another will respected contributor @a brody regarding rebuild spotlight index

I neither endorse or use the mentioned Third Party application

Onyx and other utilities such as this are best used by people who know what they are doing, and only on backed up systems.

I certainly recommend Onyx to rebuild it.

Reindex may help, let us know.

I’ve never had a problem with it. Perhaps your index is grown up or you just don’t know what it’s capable of doing and I think it should be providing results where it doesn’t.

as BDAqua noted, if they are cloud placeholder files that are not dowloaded, you cannot search by content because there is no content in those files.

it will also not return results for anything inside the library folders and other system locations. You can’t search for things inside those folders if you start the search from inside those folders and have the setting in finder settings, such that it searches the current folder.

There are times, this maybe one of those times, where we need to workaround the perceived short coming

Onyx seems to be a possible go to for such matters

By any chance is the file on another user account?

Yes you do 😎 and I do appreciate your insights and experience on this and other matters

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Do you perhaps have iCloud Drive or other remote file things at play?