Comments on: Hide Anything from Spotlight in Mac OS X with the Library Folder

By: NSGod

NSGod — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 05:29:29 +0000

If you want to disable indexing for a particular folder, just add “.noindex” to the end of the folder name.

Mark Douma

By: Hans

Hans — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:31:23 +0000

I’m going to wonder all day now, what movie is contained within “Don’t watch this secret movie.wmv.”

By: Lauri Ranta

Lauri Ranta — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 16:41:10 +0000

clod is right; files in ~/Library/ are indexed but they’re just not included in the Spotlight menu or Finder by default. Another way to search for them would be to use mdfind.

Spotlight does exclude folders that start with a period though, so a slightly better option would be to move the files somewhere like ~/.fontconfig/ or just put them in any other folder that starts with a period.

Of course someone who really wanted to find them could just use http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile to find all movie files or something.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 16:28:02 +0000

Another way to accomplish this, particularly if you don’t want a bunch of random stuff in the Library folder, is to use Disk Utility and create an encrypted disk image for your files (you can even make it password protected), and give the image an innocuous name. Spotlight won’t see the files contained in the image. You could, of course, do double duty and stick the image in the Lib folder as well.

By: Theo Vosse

Theo Vosse — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 06:54:14 +0000

I’ve always excluded the Library from Spotlight. It’s just not interesting.

However, if I wanted to find someone’s secrets on a Mac, the first thing I’d look for are files and folders excluded from Spotlight or with hidden flags. It’s *not* a good protection.

By: Gerty

Gerty — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:51:06 +0000

Smart thinking on the naming front, I like that!

By: clod

clod — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:17:07 +0000

Spotlight DOES index the user Library folder. Just search via Finder click + and select “System Folders – Are included”.

As for the Spotlight excluded folder being visible in the Spotlight System Prefs panel, simply use a custom transparent, thus invisible, icon. And a few spaces (” “) to name the folder. Now you can put it in the exclusions and nothing shows…

Then “chflags hidden” the folder and it’s nowhere to be seen….