How to search Finder's Comments section?

Comment is not the contents of the Comments field. It is some comment about the file. Where that can be entered is a mystery to me.

The Comments field in Get Info is searched with Spotlight comment.

In your search you require that comments made about the file matches "corinphila"

AND

The Comments field matches "corinphila"

You should get appropriate results if you use only "Spotlight comment."

If you want to create an OR or NOT condition, hold down the Option key and click on the … button (which was the + without Option). However, I doubt the "comment matches" condition will ever be true.

I would doubt that anything has recorded a comment on the files you are seeking so the AND requirement you have set up will return false. Anything AND false will be false.

You also should understand the difference between "matches" and "contains." The former is restricted to "word boundaries" while the latter is not. It is probably easier to play around with various combinations to see how the differ than me trying to explain what I consider a "word boundary."

Sorry - what is a search token? I thought i had all applicable fields selected. And which diagram above are you referencing? Tks.

when you type a search term into the search field, it will offer up options that match, like name contains or other matches it finds in the index. If you just type in a term and do not select any of the options, it will search for that string in the content of the file along with the file name.

In all of your screenshots you have the term you’re searching for in the comments also in the search field, so you are asking Spotlight to identify all files that have that term in their file name or in the contents of the file and then you further add criteria to search the comments field. I would imagine very few if any of your files meet all of those search requirements. If you only want to search in the comments, remove the search term from the search field.

Breaking it down into a logical statement, you are searching for:

(file contents matches corinphila OR file name contains corinphila) AND spotlight contents contains corinphila.

Run the following two commands in terminal and then either restart or log out and log back in.

sudo mdutil -X /
sudo mdutil -i on /

Sudo will temporarily elevate your privileges after you enter your password. The first mdutil command will erase the entire spotlight index folder. The second will turn indexing on.

also, confirm these files are stored on your startup drive?

mrchntmarine wrote:

I think I had tried that already.... But:

...

Still not all the results.

In your original question, you had both comments included in the search criteria. The search options use AND, not OR. So the more search criteria you include, the less likely you are to get results. When I did a quick test of Finder comments, they showed up only under "Spotlight comment". So to search by that, you'll have to make sure to include only that comment, not the other "Comment".

However, the Finder comment is an interesting artifact. And "artifact" is the proper description for it. I'm not sure how it's implemented on a modern Mac. My guess is that it's still a hybrid. I think originally it was in the ".DS_Store" file.

Plus, Spotlight is complicated. It runs based on storage metadata, which is, hélas, compliqué.

So if you're experiencing a problem, you'll need to debug it first. Don't just go search the internet or asking an AI for tricks to hack up your system in various ways in hopes that it magically fixes something. Explore the problem first.

You do have one file that's showing up. That's your hook. Make a copy of that file. The copy should show up too. Then move that file alongside one of the files that doesn't show up. Does it still show up in a Spotlight search? If not, then there is something about that new location that may be hiding it from Spotlight results. But if another, apparently identical file right next to it doesn't show up, then there is something specific about that file. Is it really a similar file? Or is there actually something really funky about it that's causing Spotlight to fail? Where did this other file come from? It's an investigative progress.

Use only "Spotlight comment".

FYI: when recently sleuthing other metadata, I noticed the following (in Sequoia).

Finder > Get Info > Comments are stored inside .DS_Store which is created when a Comment is added. Deleting .DS_Store and re-launching Finder (to clear Finder cache) loses Finder Comments in that folder despite they might still appear in the following tags via xattr and exiftool:

xattr -l image.jpg
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment: bplist00WComment

exiftool -a -G1 -s -api RequestAll=2 image.jpg
[MacOS]        XAttrMDItemFinderComment        : Comment
[MacOS]        MDItemFinderComment            : Comment

Disabling Spotlight indexing does not make much difference -- it only prevents the generation of MacOS:MDItemFinderComment.

It has been at least 30 years since I last used Finder Comments for anything serious since they were so fragile. In old System 7 there was a 3rd party INIT CommentKeeper which prevented losing Finder comments when "Desktop rebuild" was executed.

In user forums there are sometimes folks that rely on Finder Comments and complain if they vanish. So if they have just lost .DS_Store, it might be possible to salvage Comments from MDItemFinderComment or XAttrMDItemFinderComment with something like:

exiftool -m -P -overwrite_original_in_place '-XMP-dc:Description<MacOS:MDItemFinderComment' '-XMP-dc:Description<MacOS:XAttrMDItemFinderComment' .

Comments inside .DS_Store can be viewed via 'xxd .DS_Store' but I don't know how to cleanly salvage that info to XMP.

The rest of the files are not indexed properly or are stored in a location that doesn’t return results.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

Or, just use FAF.

mrchntmarine wrote:

Not sure where to go with this.... Other than just use FAF app as suggested - but I wish Finder would work to search Comments section. I took 2 files and compared them. All of the files btw were scanned by the same process and the comments section were all cut and pasted. the 3 files that only show in Finder all show in Find Any File. I show 2 for comparison - 1 that does not show in Finder results and I that shows in both places. They seem identical besides the file name and subject matter and file size. I also do not know why now 3 files shoed up whereas before only one did. Baffled.

You're clearly trying to use Finder and Spotlight for professional-grade data. These are consumer devices. They're designed for consumer data. You can use it professional data, but you have to accept those limitations and be able to deal with them.

The most interesting part of your data are those 10 MB JPEG files. JPEG is a lossy, highly-compressed, poor quality image format. It's designed for throw-away images on web sites. It should NEVER be used for any kind of professional data.

But the most direct cause of the problem you're experiencing is most likely those 10 MB JPEG images. Spotlight is likely trying to open the entire image and look for text that can be read/translated/searched. Yes, yes, yes. I know what you're going to say next. You aren't asking for that. I know this. It doesn't matter. That's how it works. That's what I mean about consumer software. Most people wouldn't understand how to configure Spotlight like this, so Spotlight isn't configurable.

You can use a 3rd-party app that behaves differently. Or you can ensure that your data is suitable beforehand. Or you can just live with it. On my computer, I just did a search for JPEG files. The top hit was an 11 MB JPEG preview of a large satellite image. This "11 MB" image is 8k x 8k in size. While I can open it will Preview, if I tried to convert it to a different format to find out how big the image really is, it would likely blow out my VM. I did this just a few days ago and that's exactly what happened.

But if I wait, then my Spotlight results eventually fill up with many files larger than 11 MB. So clearly, Spotlight is choking on these large files. On my machine, it is able to handle those files. It's just slow. Your computer might have different Spotlight importers. It could be running more slowly or perhaps even crashing.

Look in System Settings > Login Items & Extensions and disable any 3rd party QuickLook and Spotlight extensions. You'll probably have to reindex (or just wait). That might fix it.

I had missed this until etresoft’s comments. Because you entered a search term in the search field and didn’t select one of the search tokens, you are searching for contents or file names that include the search term, and also comments that contain the search term. You have created a compound search that likely won’t resolve to much.