Getting to grips with Spotlight on Mavericks

Finding files in the Finder in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks

Tagging files is unbelievable useful for helping you to find files when you need them later. It is as easy as anything to add Tags in Mavericks when you are saving a file and also possible and pretty easy when you want to Tag files later. You can tag a few files all at the same time. You can have a tag which can encompass files of all sorts in various far flung places on your hard drive. Just hit the name of the tag in the Finder later and you have all your files in one place. It can also be set up in Spotlight to combine different search criteria along with the keywords and Mavericks tagging so that you can be quite sophisticated with searches. To a certain extent it can be done with the regular Spotlight search window which you can get by using the key combination Shift-Ctrl-Spacebar. You put your first search term in the text entry box to start it off then add more as you go. To get really crazy with it and more detailed with boolean type searching then you want to use something like HoudahSpot. It is an app that is well worth getting if you regularly search for files on your computer.

The question is —- Will you remember to Tag files when you save them? Should be easier for you to remember to do this now as you get a Tags field whenever you do a save of a file. So why not?

I will be doing more with this because getting your head around boolean searching with Houdaspot takes some doing. As they say though about computer programs – Houdaspot is incredibly powerful when you have learned what it can do.

Keywords and open meta tags are not the same as Mavericks tags

I thought that Apple would use the Open Meta Data standard for tagging, but I was wrong. On the face of it, you could think that it is a bad thing that Apple didn’t embrace open standards. On the other hand, the open meta data is still there to use and gives yet another layer of data to help you find your documents. Also in Houdaspot there are tools in there that will let you keep the two in synchronisation. Look out for a video on that and I will go into a bit of depth regards how to use keywords and tagging in Mavericks.