Spotlight: You shoot thousands of images. Find any of them quickly.
Your computer is more than a forum for your work — it’s a portrait of your life. If you’re a photographer, it encompasses an ever-growing archive of your life’s work in pictures. A lifetime of exchanges with people, both professional and personal.
All of which is very valuable, and — unless you’re blessed with superhuman organisational skills — extremely unwieldy to weed through. Which is why “intelligent search” has become the holy grail of so many technologists.
Enter Spotlight. A revolutionary search technology exclusive to Mac OS X, Spotlight search puts you in command of your life and business, by allowing you to delve deeply into the contents of your files — yes, even your image files — with new power, precision and agility.
Search, Sort, Display
Spotlight helps you find what you’re looking for, even if you don’t know where to look. Just select Spotlight from the menu bar and start typing a keyword. Instantly, Spotlight starts listing results from file and folder names, the contents of text and PDF documents, email messages, Address Book contacts — virtually every type of file on your Mac’s storage drives.
When you do a Spotlight search for pictures, you don’t see just the file names of pictures. You see the pictures, because Tiger has native support for multiple image formats — PSD, JPG, TIF, RAW, HDR, and many more — you get accurate visual previews of found images. You can even launch a slideshow of the results of a photo search, directly from within Spotlight.
How does Spotlight accomplish such smart searches for purely visual content? Because it has the power to sift through metadata.
Metadata is everywhere on your computer — the creation and modification dates on your documents, the “liner notes” on your iTunes songs, etc. — but you rarely see it.
Peering Into Metadata
When you download images from your digital camera, the files usually have plentiful amounts of metadata attached. EXIF and IPTC data. Camera brand and model. Dates, times, and exposure information. And much more. With Spotlight, you can search through all that data — plus captions, annotations, keywords and tags you may have added when browsing images in iPhoto or Aperture.
The result: It’s awfully hard to lose anything. Ever. Even if you’re looking for that perfectly lit shot of the red barn that you think you took in June 2005 (but it was really August 2004).
Search Broadly or Specifically
With Spotlight, you find what you want with uncanny accuracy, even when you don’t know many details. Take the results of a search and save it as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac. Smart Folders contain files grouped together based on search criteria instead of physical location, so the same file can appear in multiple Smart Folders without moving from its original saved location on your system. No need to duplicate, shift or update files: Spotlight Smart Folders keep everything organised for you.
Tip
Use Spotlight to quickly narrow your searches. By using a few special phrases — for example, “kind:”, “presentations:”, or “Date:” — Spotlight will focus its results for you. Use a phrase like “San Francisco Canon kind:images” and you’ll only see your images of San Francisco that you shot with your Canon camera.
Pinpointing Pics
“Sometimes, my clients make choices from the original file numbers — usually it’s something like ZX045D6934,” says photographer Kevin Foley. “The good news is that all I have to do is copy and paste that file number into Spotlight and it tell me exactly where the file is. Even better, Spotlight comes up with a preview of the RAW file and I know for sure that’s the image I want — which is so much better than trying to fumble through DVDs.”
