[ideasculptor]

I hate the way iTunes organizes my music directory, mostly because I access it from apps other than iTunes, so after I rip a CD, I copy it to the place tht I want it and then re-add it to my music library with the 'copy to iTunes directory' option turned off.

I was really shocked when I discovered that typing 'Jazz' into a spotlight query didn't return every song in my library with the genre set to 'Jazz.' It only returns the songs with the word 'jazz' in the title. I pointed out this obvious deficiency to a friend, who promptly tried it on his machine, and his worked exactly as you'd expect. The only difference between our machines (exact same powerbook hardware) was that my library was stored external to my iTunes directory and his was not. Actually, now that I think about it, my library is about 70GB, while his is only 5 or 10GB. However, I have something like 5,000 songs labelled as Jazz, so you'd think spotlight would find at least one of them. And yes, both machines had definitely finished indexing the drives before we did the test.

So it looks as though apple left a big fat bug in spotlight such that it learns nothing about iTunes metadata unless the songs are stored in the iTunes directory. Incidentally, every one of the songs has ID3 tags.

[Ganesha]

Did spotlight finish indexing? To check find a mp3 you know to be jazz and

mdls filename

It should return a item of kMDItemMusicalGenre

Mine sure picks up ID3 tags outside of iTunes

[Superchicken]

Mine brings up songs that are in my Ska genre if I type in ska... sounds like you haven't had the whole thing indexed...

[THE MAC GOD]

Someone needs to make a small app that forces SL to reindex everything on your mac including external HDs... I'd do it but my programming skills aren't to snuff.

It needs to be an app with a big button that says PUSH ME. And then it makes SL do the rest.

[Gee4orce]

Five. Thousand. Jazz. Tracks.

Man....

...the agony.

[RevEvs]

i just think there are some bugs in spotlight.. yesterday spotlight decided to "forget" about all my photos - which it found perfectly fine to start with... now it wont, oh well

[kman42]

Spotlight doesn't know about my iPhoto 5 keywords. It seems to be able to find everything else I've thrown at it. Any ideas?

kman

[toffe]

I ordered an external hard drive (250Gb - mostly for backup and digital photos) today, and i started to wonder:
how will spotligth handle that?

Will it index the drive every time it is plugged in, and if so, will it take a loong time.
Or is the drive not completely occupied during that, so you can still use it?

Anyone with experience may answer.

[MacRules]

Originally Posted by kman42

Spotlight doesn't know about my iPhoto 5 keywords. It seems to be able to find everything else I've thrown at it. Any ideas?

kman

I just put a keyword on a photo and it found it just fine. I did notice that the comments I had on the photos before the upgrade were not indexed. If I change a comment now it gets indexed just fine. Maybe it is the same problem with keywords.

[CaptainHaddock]

I ordered an external hard drive (250Gb - mostly for backup and digital photos) today, and i started to wonder: how will spotlight handle that?

If you only use the drive with your Mac, it should behave just like your internal drive (i.e. it'll be indexed the normal way, every time you modify a file).

If you disconnect the drive and use it with other computers, I'm not sure what happens; but Spotlight's index file stays in the drive's root directory, I believe.

[eggman]

Speaking of Spotlight bugs...

I don't know if this is a bug, or just the way it behaves on a new install, but it certainly seems flaky: a couple of hours after my upgrade install - on a 160G drive with about 40G free - I finally stop getting the pulsing dot in the Spotlight icon... and it allows me to do a search. So I attempt a search for something that I know it'll find scads of files for: my wife's name. At the very least it should find a mess of photos in a subdirectory of my Pictures folder.

Well, it doesn't come up with much. A smattering of files, and the little rotating activity glyph spins and spins... finding a few more files, but not the Mother Lode that I know is there... and suddenly *poof* the list of found files vanishes - and I'm once again greeted with the message that Spotlight is indexing my drive... and the text entry box for it is disabled.

Rinse and repeat. Sometimes it'll indicate that it's calculating the length of the indexing cycle... but then it will let me do another search! Sometimes it will go and estimate the length of the indexing cycle... and it can vary, from 25 minutes.... to 16 hours.... but it will still randomly let me do these lame searches from time to time.

So... do I just need to ignore it for a few days until it has had more than adequate time to look inside every nook and cranny of my drive.... or is this anamalous behavior, and I should be looking at a re-install of Tiger?

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by THE MAC GOD

Someone needs to make a small app that forces SL to reindex everything on your mac including external HDs... I'd do it but my programming skills aren't to snuff.

It needs to be an app with a big button that says PUSH ME. And then it makes SL do the rest.

I assume you can type in terminal? It's not hard. Don't be afraid, it doesn't bite.

mdimport(1) BSD General Commands Manual mdimport(1)

NAME
mdimport -- import file hierarchies into the metadata datastore.

SYNOPSIS
mdimport [-VfXLr] [-d level | category] [-w delay] file | directory

DESCRIPTION
mdimport can be used to import metadata from files or file system hierar-
chies.

The following options are available:

-V Print timing information for this run of mdimport.

-A Print out the list of all of the attributes and their local-
izations in the current language and exit.

-f Force mdimport to scan the files, bypassing path filtering
rules.

-X Print the schema file and exit

-r Ask the server to reimport files for UTIs claimed by the
listed plugin. For example, the following would cause all of
the chat files on the system to be reimported:

mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Chat.mdimporter

-p Print out performance information gathered during the run.

-L Print the list of installed importers and exit.

-d level | category
Print debugging information. Level can be 1-4, available
categories are import-terse, import-input, import-output,
import-warnings, import-verbose, and plugin-loading. This
flag can be specified multiple times, and is always additive.

-n Don't actually set the attributes on the file. Useful for
debugging.

-w msecs Wait for the specified interval between scanning files.

SEE ALSO
mdcheckschema(1), mdfind(1), mdutil(1), mdls(1)

[eggman]

Follow-up to my last post. I kept my system from going to sleep last night... and this morning Spotlight is working the way it ought to... which makes me very happy. I'm posting this in case anyone else sees the flaky behavior I was seeing: hang in there for a few days... and don't let your system sleep!

[DeRobeHer]

I experienced the same behavior. It appears that Spotlight will create an initial index shortly after you login to Tiger for the first time, and then build a more comprehensive index later.