hi this is Gary with macmost.com let me show you how you can easily use
terms like and or and not when searching in the finder [Music]
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get exclusive content and course discounts now on the finder let's say you want to do a search
for JPEG files that have the word test in them now I can click on the search button here at the
top right or use command F and then search for tests and then I have the choices name contains
test or content contains tests I could select name contains test and get results that have
tests somewhere in the name now instead I could have just typed Name colon and then test with no
space there and then a return and it gets me the same thing anything with that phrase in
the name now let's say I wanted to narrow this down to only be JPEG files and I can see a few
of them here here's one here's another one notice it's a different extension for this one with an e
in the extension and so I want to keep that in mind when I'm searching now the straightforward
way to do this is to click the plus button next to save here in the search line in the window
and then I can go and select something else like name matches and put dot jpg and then I get file
names imagine this but I'm missing the JPay EG if I change it to that I get those but now I'm
missing the other kind too plus this is kind of convoluted you're doing the first part of the
search up here in the search box and then you're adding additional criteria in different lines
here I can continue to add more things here like I can say name matches and then dot jpg
and now I can say I get nothing because there are no files I meet all three conditions having test
having dot jpeg in the title and Dot jpg in the title so how would I do this well it gets even
more convoluted than that because what I would do is I would remove this one I'd hold the option
key down and the plus changes to three dots click on that and then I would remove this one here and
then say any of the following are true which is equivalent to or and say name matches Dot and then
jpg and then another one and name matches dot JPEG and now I finally get the results I want matching
everything but you can see how convoluted this was to do there's an easier way if we just go back to
the search box here we can do it all by typing now if I were to type Name colon test then I get
everything to test in it and you think that if I would type and Name colon dot jpg that I would get
things that match both of those but I don't the reason is is because you can't just use and you
have to use and all uppercase A and D with capital letters then the search box will recognize that as
the Boolean operator that it is and you get things that match both of those now I could do or as well
so I can do Name colon dot JPEG but I get really weird results now because I get things that don't
have tests in them so what this is actually doing is it's saying anything with the name test and jpg
in there or anything that has jpeg in there which you can see I get some of the results there so you
can use parentheses in here to make it clearer what you want so I'll put one after this and one
after that and now that's my complete Boolean structure there to search for everything with
the name test and either of these two spellings of the jpeg extension and you can see how much more
straightforward this is to having to do that by building it in the finder buying different lines
of search criteria the key to remember here is using capital letters for and and capital letters
for or and I could do the same thing here with not so for instance if I were to change and to not
then my results would be everything would test in the name but not including anything with j p g or
j p e g in the title and you can see that's what I get here and you could use parentheses to make
this as complex as you want all on one line and if you want to save them you could save it as a
save search also known as a smart folder you could simply copy and paste this as a piece
of text somewhere to reuse at a later time so you don't have to type it all oh by the way you could
also search for things like kind and then put a standard term like image there and give you all
the images and you could do date as well but you don't want to put date you want to put created or
modified and then colon and then format your date like this and then you'll get results if you want
things that are from before that date put a less than in front of it if you want things that are
after that date you put a greater than in front of it and then of course you can use and and then put
another date there to get a range so I hope you found this tip useful thanks for watching [Music]
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