Force Spotlight to reindex a volume without using Terminal
Are you scared of the command line? Or, are simply not familiar enough with it to want to go mucking around with your system? You are not alone. Here is a quick tip, that a few well tailored Google searches would have told you, but we thought we’d jot it down for you.
Have you recently added a huge chunk of data to your system? Perhaps you’ve just dragged a few hundred megabytes worth of documents from an old system, or even imported a photo library from another computer. Now, you’d like to use the power of Spotlight to search those new files, yet it appears that Spotlight has yet to index that new data and you are frustrated because you need to find a specific file quickly.
Fear not young Terminal padawan, this quick tip could help you out. You can force Spotlight to reindex any, or all, volumes on your system without ever touching Terminal. Here are the steps you need to take to do this.
- Open Spotlight Preferences
- In the privacy tab, add the volume you want to reindex
- After a few moments, remove that volume from the privacy list
- Allow Spotlight to reindex the volume
Depending on the size of the volume, whether or not that volume is compressed, or perhaps the size of each individual file, Spotlight could take quite awhile to reindex the entire volume. Reindexing an entire volume may not be the best course for everyone, perhaps you only need to reindex a single folder. You can do this by instead just adding that single directory to your privacy list, rather than the entire volume.
Essentially what this does, is it literally deletes Spotlights index file for that specific volume/directory. Once you remove that volume/directory from the privacy list, Spotlight is forced to recreate that index file. It is a simple workaround, yet effective.
I’m busy as a bee trying to associate keywords to my photos in iPhoto, and sometimes Spotlight doesn’t index quick enough for me, so I use this procedure to quickly index my iPhoto library so that I can search my photos efficiently.
Hope this helps you the next time you really need to find something.
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This tip would work great if it weren’t for the fact that adding items to my “Privacy” tab in the Spotlight Preferences leaves me with an empty list in said “Privacy” tab. I am currently using the Terminal to force a re-index. Hopefully all will work, as I don’t have a “.Spotlight-V100″ folder anywhere on my root. (I looked via my Windows installation via Virtual PC.)
Craig Gorsuch on July 31st, 2006 12:53 pm