Get smart with Spotlight
Tigerstorm (1009 pencils) | Mon, 2005-05-02 03:23
In the beginning of computer age, owning a hard drive was pretty expensive and they were pretty small compared of today. By time we created more and more files and put them in folders, easy back then when we could find folders and files on the drive like in our own pocket, today it's a different story. Today we have billions of files and we create more and more every minute, hour and day.
How often haven't you made things in Photoshop, Illustrator and several other applications and forgot about those files, you saved them in a folder gosh now where, and when you search for them you can't seem to find them anywhere.
But help is here! With Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger you can create folders called "Smart folders" that could keep track on your files where ever they are on your big system.
How-to setup a smart folder:
1. Open finder, In the Finder, choose File > New Smart Folder.
2. Narrow the search, specify a location for the search, I choose for this example "Computer" and the files I want to keep track on is my PSD files created in Adobe Photoshop so I write that in the search form.
3. Below you can choose several options like kind, latest opened and what kind of files or choose any date.
4. I choose by kind, latest opened, images and any date.
5. Now we have a smart folder that helps me to find all PSD files on my computer no matter where they are.
6. Choose save and your Smart folder is automatically being added to your Sidebar in Finder. If you don't want the Smart folder to be added to your Sidebar just deselect "Add To Sidebar"
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Seems like I'm not the only one who has billions of unclassified, unsorted files.
*sigh*
What happened to, oh I don't know, organizing things? Isn't that what files and folders are for? Computers make this absolutely trivial. I still can't wrap my head around why someone would throw all their crap in one big sloppy pile and search through it before they'd put their crap where it belongs and already know where it is. Designers especially.
While I'm all for any technology that can make things easier, I must admit that in over 20 years of using Macs (and computers in general), I've never once had to search for a file I created. I organize them by client, job type (ads, posters, outdoor boards, etc...) and job number. And the files are named so that I know what they are. It amazes me when I see people with 300 files on their desktop and using the search bar to find what they want.
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It's not about keeping things organized, it's about findability and speed. Even if you have everything organized you can use Quicksilver/Spotlight type interfaces to access files faster than you can by clicking through properly named folders *or* giant piles of unorganized crap.
What happens when you need to compare .PSDs across multiple clients, or query a (efficiently organized) library of images for a "blue flower"?!?! I bet I can access that data [regardless of how (un)organized it is] with Spotlight or Quicksilver faster than you can with thousands of organized folders. So many uses and so little creativity... abre los ojos.
I don't mean to give the impression that I think Spotlight is a bad thing. I think it's a big step forward in accessing information. Like the example you gave, searching content across client folders (How many clients have I done logos for? Let's take a look in the "Logos" smart folder) and finding data within documents (Which PDF magazine has that delicious recipe for tofurkey? [No results, hmmm]) are now possible, with probably a million other great ideas in the works.
All I'm saying is that a powerful search function makes good organization better. It's not a replacement for it. Two cents.
It does make good organization better, no doubt. I just think it's faster to actually *find* something via Quicksilver or Spotlight than it is to click the Finder icon and think about *where* it is. If I walk over to our eMac that we let our entire office use and there _are_ 300+ files on the desktop I can still have a client on the phone and *know* that I can find what I want in 2 sec... and that is a beautiful thing.