Did not know Finder search worked this way? Or bug?

[donawalt]

So, I have a folder that's stored on iCloudDrive on my MacBook Pro. It has about 150 files in it. Today, in Finder I searched for a file in that specific folder by name and it did not find it - so I went and grabbed the file somewhere else, pasted it into the folder, and I got the "File Exists" box - what? I sort by name, scroll down , and voila it is there!

I narrowed it down to this - for some reason I don't understand, some of the files in that folder have the little status icon of a cloud with a down arrow. Many do not. I click on all of the files with the cloud/down arrow icon, so the files downloaded, and then Finder could search on them.

Is that how finder works, even though the files show in Finder they are not searchable, even by file name? Or is this a bug, or a setting I have wrong?

 

[Bigwaff]

Spotlight doesn’t index files which are stored in iCloud Drive unless the files have been downloaded locally. It does make some sense. Local Spotlight indexing process needs access to the files in order to index them.

Personally, I consider this poor design and one could make a compelling argument it is a “bug” in Spotlight indexing.