When you open HoudahSpot – and have not yet changed the default setup – you will see three preconfigured search criteria in the Refine section:
- Name – e.g. the file name or the mail subject of Apple Mail messages
- Text Content – e.g. of word processing documents, presentations …
- Content Kind – file type like Image, PDF, Mail, Folder …
More search criteria
To get access to other popular search criteria like Content Created date or File Size, open the criteria pop-up menu.
Even more search criteria
But actually, there are hundreds of search criteria to choose from. Select Other… to get a list of all criteria available.
To add a criterion from the list to the pop-up menu, double-click the row. Check «In Menu» to add criteria without immediately using them.
The criteria chosen will be added to all the pop-up menus of the current search. If you want them to show up in every new search document, use Save as Default from the File menu. Or set up Templates for specific searches.
Which search criteria are available for a specific file type?
For any given file, only some of these criteria will actually contain information – a.k.a. metadata. What kind of metadata is available and how it is labeled depends on the file type and the applications that created the file, respectively. For example, one mail client may refer to the sender as «Sender» while another mail client may store it as «Author».
But how to find out, e.g.
- under what label my mail client stores sender or recipient information?
- if the name of my photo camera model can be found in my pictures’ metadata?
- what kind of metadata information is available for my PDF files?
Just refer to HoudahSpot’s Info pane to see all metadata recorded for a given file.
You can assume that other files of the same type will have the same metadata. Therefore, if you find that
- your mail application stores the sender’s name as «Author»
- your photos have the camera model listed as «Device Model»
- in your PDF files, the number of pages they contain is stored under «Pages»
you can use these criteria for your searches.