Restarting and relaunching Spotlight on the Mac have been helpful troubleshooting tricks since the debut of the search engine to the MacOS platform. Often if you restart Spotlight, rebuild the index, or kill specific Spotlight processes, you can typically resolve many common issues with the MacOS search engine. Given the utility of relaunching the Spotlight … Read More
A fair number of Mac users are experiencing a frustrating issue with the Spotlight search engine which seems to prevent Spotlight on the Mac from finding any local files at all. This Spotlight problem is not subtle, and when you’re experiencing it, Spotlight basically has no ability to find any local file, even if your … Read More
macOS Tahoe 26 adds some new features, but it also has taken a prominent popular feature away on the Mac, and that is the removal of the dedicated LaunchPad app from macOS Tahoe. LaunchPad is the simple app launcher that is kind of iOS-like and has been on the Mac for a longtime, visible in … Read More
Spotlight is the powerful search engine built into MacOS that allows you to quickly find any file or data on your Mac disk drives. Part of what makes Spotlight so fast is that it uses caches and temporary files during indexing to quickly refer to data on your Mac, but sometimes those Spotlight files can … Read More
Did you know that, by default, your Mac search queries entered into Spotlight, Safari, Siri, Lookup, and #images, are sent to Apple? While this information is anonymized so as not to be identifying, and Apple says it’s used to improve search results, many Mac users may not want this search information being shared with Apple … Read More
A fair number of Mac users have discovered that Spotlight Search is not working well in macOS Tahoe and Sequoia, either missing files, apps, and sometimes not working at all to find any local file. For some users the issues with Spotlight happens right after they update to macOS Tahoe or Sequoia, and for others … Read More
Calculators are wildly useful tools for various obvious reasons, whether you need to perform simple math or complex calculations. One of the more curious iPad oversights on Apple’s behalf is the lack of a built-in Calculator app, which is missing on iPad, but has been included on the Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch, since the … Read More
If you have ever been using Spotlight to search for stuff on your iPhone or iPad, and found a situation where photos are showing up in search, and you’d rather them not at all, then you can make a settings change to make sure this does not happen. Whether you’re wanting images to stop showing … Read More
MacOS is loaded with features, and while some of them are obvious (like the Dock), there are a ton of other features on the Mac that may not be widely used by all Mac users. With that in mind, we’re going to discuss three super useful Mac features that all MacOS users should be using, … Read More
Spotlight Search is enabled by default on the iPhone Lock Screen, along with Today View. This may be convenient for some users, but for others it’s either annoying, unnecessary, or a potential privacy breech as anyone who picks up the iPhone can see and search through your apps, calendar, and other personal data. While the … Read More
Finding a specific file on your Mac can be a tedious process sometimes, even if you keep all your files and folders organized. Thanks to Finder and Spotlight search, you can quickly find the exact file you’re looking for, regardless of where it’s stored on the Mac. We’ll cover how to find files on a … Read More
Did you know you can enter file system and folder paths into Spotlight on Mac? This handy trick offers a way to quickly access buried files and folders on a Mac, regardless of where they are on in the file system.
Do you have many apps, files, emails, messages, contacts, and other data on the iPhone or iPad that you wish you could easily search through? It can be a challenge to scroll through all the home screen pages, contact lists, notes, emails, messages, and other stuff to find what you’re looking for on iOS and … Read More
Do you wish you could enable Dark mode or Light mode interface themes faster in Mac OS? Maybe you wish there was a keystroke to switch from Dark or Light mode on the Mac? If you’re tired of heading over to System Preferences to make the change, you can use a nifty trick to quickly … Read More
Need to open a website quickly on a Mac? You’re in luck, because you can open a website URL from just about anywhere on a Mac by using Spotlight. This is arguably the fastest way to get to a website by URL, aside from launching a website bookmark from the Mac Dock anyway.
Have you ever wanted to quickly find every screen shot you have on a Mac? With a little-known search trick, you can easily list every single screen shot file on Mac OS. Going further, you can also search by names in screen shots, types, and dates as well, all by using the Mac Finder search … Read More
Have you ever been in a situation where you know you want to find a JPEG file type and you know the name of the file, but you don’t want to search other document types on the Mac? You can use image specific file format search operators on Spotlight in Mac OS to help narrow … Read More
You can quickly access “Get Info” for any file or application from within Spotlight search results in Mac OS and Mac OS X. Getting file info from Spotlight requires a set of two simple keystrokes, first to get into Spotlight, then the next is to Get Info on the selected or found item in question. … Read More
