How to search Finder's Comments section?

Spotlight is not perfect. I have noticed two obscure flaws:

- For some strange reason Spotlight does not search .m4v movie metadata (one of Final Cut Pro export defaults). Also Finder > Get Info also fails to display that metadata. But if that same file is renamed as .mp4, then both work as expected. You can test that by inserting Description...

exiftool -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='qwerty' movie.m4v
exiftool -a -G1 -s -Keys:Description movie.m4v                   
[Keys]          Description                     : qwerty

...and renaming duplicated .m4v in Finder as .mp4 and doing a Spotlight search for "qwerty" or viewing Finder > Get Info. Spotlight and Finder > Get Info display that metadata only in the duplicated and renamed .mp4 (QuickTime Player and Photos.app do display it also in .m4v):

- Similar flaw: I had numerous .jpg which stubbornly displayed old Description and Keywords in Spotlight and Finder > Get Info and failed to display updated IPTC/XMP metadata. After some sleuthing I noticed that some app had inserted following weird org.openmetainfo* xattr to them and that somehow choked Spotlight updating its info:

org.openmetainfo:kMDItemDescription
org.openmetainfo:kMDItemKeywords
org.openmetainfo:kMDItemCreator
org.openmetainfo:kMDItemStarRating
org.openmetainfo:kMDItemCopyright

org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemDescription
org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemKeywords
org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemCreator
org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemStarRating
org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemCopyright

The fix was to remove outdated Spotlight info with:

xattr -rd com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDescription .
xattr -rd com.apple.metadata:kMDItemKeywords .

That was enough to fix it at least temporarily, but but while I was there, I removed also those pesky weird extended attributes with:

xattr -rd org.openmetainfo:kMDItemDescription .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo:kMDItemKeywords .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo:kMDItemCreator .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo:kMDItemStarRating .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo:kMDItemCopyright .

xattr -rd org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemDescription .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemKeywords .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemCreator .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemStarRating .
xattr -rd org.openmetainfo.time:kMDItemCopyright .

mrchntmarine wrote:

Barney-15E wrote:

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….

So a token is a search term?

It’s a search criteria, which has been found to match the term you entered.

mrchntmarine wrote:

Ok, so maybe I don’t know how to use the detailed search properly. The only way I’ve been able to get the tokens up and the search word below, was by starting to type it above in the search field and work then on. I’ll have to try again without having there and see if I can get the tokens / spotlight comments then. Tks !

Cmd-F will bring up a search window without entering anything in the search field

Entering a term will expand the additional options, or you can just use command F.