Spotlight "Number of items" works while re-indexing only

I have a 4GB Seagate external HDD which I’ve nearly filled with files. I recently was asked to provide photos of events I’ve taken over the past dozen years of an organization for a special presentation. In 10.9.5 (Mavericks) using the Finder I was able to locate about 80 GB of photos (out of hundreds of GB of photos) for the presentation but I wanted to use Spotlight to help me find even more but I have a problem. When I select Kind is “Folders” I get about 37,000 folders located and when I add the filtering criteria “Number of items” as soon as I enter a value into the text box there are no folders visible that meet the criteria regardless the number or the Boolean operation. So I forced Spotlight to re-index the HDD and while it was updating the index Spotlight functioned correctly (I could use the Find command to display folders with “Number of items” “greater than” X) so I left it alone to run for most of a day to complete the task. When it finished, it no longer could filter the 37,000+ folders by “Number of items” again.

Any ideas what the problem is and how to solve it (does this work correctly in 10.8 or 10.10?) or how to devise a work around using the terminal window?

TIA.