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"All My Files" Not showing all my flies

"All my files" only shows a few files. For example, under "music" the only thing(s) that show up are 12 songs from an album that I downloaded from Amazon.com. None of the other 12k songs I have on my Mac show up here. Also, none of my photos show up. None... at all. Also, none of my Word documnets show up. The list of things not listed goes on and non.


I checked Spotlight prefrences and I have everything checked under "search resluts" and nothing at all is listed under "privacy."


Any ideas on why things won't show up?


Thanks for the help.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 12:42 PM

Reply
51 replies

Jul 21, 2011 1:07 PM in response to zachs

Music in iTunes works fine. All songs are listed, accessible, and show up in iTunes search. It's more than just my music... Only one photo shows up in "All my files"... some "gradient.jpg" stored under ~/sites/images. None of my iphoto images are showing up.


It does, however, seem to be showing any excel and word files that I have. PDFs show up also.


So I wasn't 100% accurate in my initial description.


It seems like the issues are with music and photos. As I mentioned, for some reason, it will show some album I downloaded from Amazon.com a few months ago, but I'm guessing that's because it's stored in a different folder than all my other music (since it was an amazon download).

Jul 21, 2011 7:25 PM in response to WaterGlobe43

I'm having a similar problem. I've narrowed it down somewhat, though. For me, the only "Music" files that show up in the "All My Files" view are the files that *aren't* in iTunes. In other words, if I just have some songs in a folder on my hard drive that I haven't imported into iTunes, those will show up, but not the 12k+ songs that are in my iTunes library. Likewise, the only photos that show up in "All My Files" under "Images" are the ones that *aren't* in my iPhoto library.


I'm still having problems with some (most) of my files not showing up in the "All My Files" view. I only have one Excel spreadsheet that shows up under "Spreadsheets", even though I have about 150 spreadsheets on my hard drive. The confusing thing is that the one spreadsheet that does show up is in the top level of my "Documents" folder (not in a subfolder beneath it), and yet there's *another* spreadsheet in that exact same folder that isn't showing up. Both of them are .xlsx files, both created by me using the same version of Excel, etcetera. I can't figure out why one of them is showing up in "All My Files" and the other one isn't.


"All My Files" is also showing that I only have 58 .PDF files, even though I have over 700. I'm trying to figure out now what is different about the 58 it's recognizing compared to the 638 that "All My Files" isn't listing.

Jul 21, 2011 8:31 PM in response to WaterGlobe43

I'm still making progress on the problem. The main issue seems to be that "All My Files" ("AMF" hereafter) doesn't look everywhere that Spotlight looks when trying to find files. Specifically, AMF appears to only look under your User folder. Some of my "missing" PDFs were on a second hard drive (not under my User folder), and when I moved them into my "Documents" folder, they then appeared in AMF. It's possible that they showed up in AMF simply because I moved them, and not specifically because of *where* I moved them to, though.


Second, AMF (unlike Spotlight) doesn't appear to look in email attachments. Many of my files that are "missing" in AMF only exist as unsaved attachments in my Mail messages.


As discussed earlier, music and pictures that are in my iPhoto and iTunes libraries don't appear in AMF.


In my earlier post, I said that AMF only showed me one Excel spreadsheet, even though there's another one stored in the exact same folder. I opened up the "missing" spreadsheet in Excel, made a trivial change and then saved it. Immediately, the previously-missing spreadsheet showed up in AMF. This makes me wonder if there's not some background indexing going on for AMF that's separate from Spotlight indexing. The reason why I'm thinking it may be separate is that I re-indexed Spotlight and it didn't change the files displayed in AMF.

Jul 21, 2011 9:28 PM in response to WaterGlobe43

Here's another data point: I found some PDFs under my Documents folder that weren't showing up in AMF. I found that simply opening one up in Acrobat Reader would cause it to show up in AMF (I didn't have to change and re-save the PDF).


I did notice that if I selected multiple PDFs at once and opened them all at the same time, some of them would then appear in AMF, while others wouldn't. But opening up a single PDF by itself would always add it to the files shown in AMF (as long as the PDF was somewhere under my User folder - if I first copied the PDF to a second hard drive that's not under my User folder and *then* opened it, it still wouldn't show up in AMF.)


In short, here's what I've discovered so far:


1) AMF doesn't seem to index anything that's not somewhere under my User folder.


2) Not everything under my User folder shows up in AMF, but if I open a "missing" file that's under my User folder, it will then show up in AMF. (Except for pictures and songs - see #3)


3) AMF doesn't index anything that's in my iPhoto or iTunes libraries (even after opening a picture in iPhoto or playing a song in iTunes.)


4) AMF doesn't index attachments to Mail messages unless you download the attachment (presumably because it's then stored under your User folder.)


5) AMF will only seem to (sometimes) index Excel spreadsheets if they're saved as .xlsx files. Even opening, changing and saving a .xls file won't get it to show up in AMF afterward. Spreadsheets are strange, in fact. Even with some .xlsx files, they'll show up in AMF *while I have them open in Excel*, but as soon as I close them in Excel, they disappear from AMF again. This is the only types of file I've seen disappear from AMF after they've shown up once - all the other file types seem to stay in AMF once you can get them to show up there.

"All My Files" Not showing all my flies

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