So I often find that people get frustrated when trying to find files on their Mac.
Files that they know that are there but they can't seem to locate them.
There are a few common mistakes people do when trying to search for files on their Mac.
Maybe you're doing some of these.
The main thing that people do is they don't realize the search scope.
This is where you're searching for the file.
So, for instance, say that you know you have a file called Milestones and you want to look
for it.
But you happen to be looking in the folder Temp which is a folder with a bunch of pictures.
The Milestones' file is not there.
But that's fine.
That's why you want to search for it, right.
The most common reason you want to search for a file is you don't see it.
It's not where you are.
You want to find this Milestones file.
So you search for it.
You click here in the Search field and you type milestones only to see that you get zero
items.
Nothing.
Why is this?
Well it's because of search scope.
Look at the top here.
It says Search and then This Mac and Temp.
So what has happened here is you're searching in the current directory.
You were in the Temp directory and the search is being executed there.
If you want to find this Milestones' file you need to switch the search scope to This
Mac.
Which actually can give you quite a bit of results because now you're searching your
entire Mac including library files and application files and sorts of things.
So a better option is to actually, before you search, go up to a level where you know
that the file was underneath it.
For instance you can go to your Home folder and you know that it's somewhere in here or
perhaps into your Documents folder.
So if you know you have all your files in Documents and you search for Milestones here
you can see the file comes up.
Actually a few of them come up.
I can click on them and see where each one is located.
So there's one in my personal folder, there's one in project C for instance.
But I do find the files when I'm there.
You can change the default behavior by going to Finder, Preferences and under Advanced
you have When performing a search start in the current folder, the entire Mac, or the
previous search scope.
So instead of being in the current folder it's wherever you searched last.
So you can set it to one of these.
But no matter which one you have it set at you're best bet is to go to some sort of top
level like your Documents folder or your Home folder and start a search from there just
to make sure you cover all your bases.
Now you may also notice when you search for files that you do have the option to search
for Name Matches.
Because if you notice here in my results I have a file right there that doesn't actually
even have the name in the name of the file.
This may seem confusing but the term is actually in the content of that file.
So when you're doing a regular search you're actually searching file names and the content.
That may not be what you want.
So when typing you can select Name Matches and now you get only that.
A shortcut for that is to type name colon and it automatically does that.
If you like typing shortcuts you can do it that way.
But that confuses a lot of people especially if you have files that have lots of words
in them.
As a game developer I have tons of files with dictionaries in them and things like that
and if I search for anything I'm going to come up with all sorts of files that aren't
what I'm looking for.
So I almost always search by name.
Now another thing you may want to do is to search for something not by name or content
at all.
But say maybe by date or file size or something.
We know that we can do a search and then we can after that search is there, whether you're
doing it by name or content or whatever, you can hit the plus button and then do something
like, you know, create a date or the kind or file size or whatever.
But what if you want to start there.
You just want to look for large files for instance.
It doesn't seem to be a way to do it.
You seem to have to enter something in here.
But all you need to do is use the shortcut.
So you can go to File Find or Command F. As soon as you do that, even though you haven't
typed anything in there to begin with, you now have the ability to narrow what you've
got.
So you can do file sizes greater than say a certain amount and narrow down what you've
got.
So one last mistake that people make when searching is using Spotlight to search for
files.
It works.
You can do Command space and you could do a Spotlight search and you'll come up with
documents here.
But you're going to come up with lots of other stuff.
All the stuff that comes up is in System Preferences and if you go to Spotlight you can see all
these different things that Spotlight looks for.
So when you know you want to find a file it's usually best just to go to the Finder, even
if you don't have a Finder window open you can still do Command F and it will open up
and new Finder window, and you can start the search, set the scope to whatever it is that
you want, and search specifically for files instead of doing it in Spotlight and searching
and getting all of this stuff that you don't want.