Tagging things for spotlight

[andcraig]

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to quickly give all the documents in a folder information to help spotlight idenitfy them.
I've been testing it out and searching for different subjects (spanish, chemistry, english, etc.) and only a few documents will come up from each folder.
Just curious of there was some way to edit all of their information at once to include the same spotlight comment.

 

[mad jew]

I'm almost certain you could do this through Automator. Have you given it a try?

 

[stridey]

I'm almost certain you could do this through Automator. Have you given it a try?

You can. If you get lazy, frustrated, or just don't want to spend the time, here's (apple.com) the workflow.

 

[andcraig]

Thanks Stridey, thats working like a charm

One other question though: Is there any way to keep spotlight from searching system files like dictionary entries and MSOffice application files?
For instance, i search spanish, looking for the school work tagged with spanish, but come up with update logs, spanish thesuari, spanish dictionaries.

(and its off topic but seemed wasteful to start a new thread, has anyone run into having the yellow minimize circle on windows stop functioning? every once in a while it'll just gray out for an application, doesn't cause any problems other than being unable to minimize a window to dock.)

 

[stridey]

Thanks Stridey, thats working like a charm

One other question though: Is there any way to keep spotlight from searching system files like dictionary entries and MSOffice application files?
For instance, i search spanish, looking for the school work tagged with spanish, but come up with update logs, spanish thesuari, spanish dictionaries.

(and its off topic but seemed wasteful to start a new thread, has anyone run into having the yellow minimize circle on windows stop functioning? every once in a while it'll just gray out for an application, doesn't cause any problems other than being unable to minimize a window to dock.)

Well, you can select folders for spotlight to ignore (in System Preferences > Spotlight), so you can narrow the search parameters somewhat that way.

And no, I haven't run into a problem with the minimize button. However, command-M usually minimizes windows, so if you're having a problem using the button, try using the keyboard command.

 

[crees!]

Thanks Stridey, thats working like a charm

One other question though: Is there any way to keep spotlight from searching system files like dictionary entries and MSOffice application files?
For instance, i search spanish, looking for the school work tagged with spanish, but come up with update logs, spanish thesuari, spanish dictionaries.

(and its off topic but seemed wasteful to start a new thread, has anyone run into having the yellow minimize circle on windows stop functioning? every once in a while it'll just gray out for an application, doesn't cause any problems other than being unable to minimize a window to dock.)

Go on versiontracker.com and search for either Monolingual or XOverload. I found Monolingual works best. Both programs will remove all non-essential localization files from your system. Meaning you don't need any Dutch or Spanish help files right? If you use Monolingual and are just keeping the English language make sure English and U.S. English is UNCHECKED. All checked languages will be removed. You can save hundreds of MBs of space by doing this. Plus Spotlight won't pick them up anymore.

\m/

Edit: The programs are called Delocalizers.

 

[jsalzer]

Better Tags

Hey - just a suggestion - rather than tagging things with a common word like "Spanish", why not tag them with "keyspanish" and "keychemistry", or "xspanish" and "xchemistry", or "=spanish" and "=chemistry", or whatever convention you'd like to choose?

Actually, maybe put the extra bit at the end, like "spanishkey", then you can do a search for "spanish" and get everything, or "spanishk" to reduce it to things you tagged.

Justa thought.