Sometimes, you get a list of file names and need to find the actual files. You may be a photographer who sent out a contact sheet for photo proofing and got back an email listing the images to be printed. Or you may have sent friends messages with tiny photos and got a reply asking for larger copies of images 7359, 7365 and 7366.
HoudahSpot can help you work through such notes and collect the requested files. Continue reading Find Files from a List of Names
10 years ago, we released the very first version of what came to be one of the most popular search tools on the Mac: HoudahSpot.
Continue reading HoudahSpot: 10 Years of Successful Searching on the Mac
HoudahSpot allows you to customize many aspects of a file search: query, criteria, locations, columns, sort order, etc.
You will want to save such customized searches for later reuse. HoudahSpot gives you different ways to do so.
Let’s say you have set out to store all your MP3 and AAC songs in the Music folder. Yet, over time, some of those files have been saved to other locations. You can use HoudahSpot to find the misplaced files and move these where they belong. Continue reading Find and refile misplaced files
In Tembo, you can select which folder or volume to search by clicking its name in the main sidebar. Continue reading Search Across Multiple Folders in Tembo
In a previous post, we searched for files with no Spotlight comment or tags. Today, we are looking for photos with no GPS latitude or longitude information.
The technique we used last time works for any metadata attribute containing text. For example: subject, author, album, etc. It does not work for number or date values. HoudahSpot won’t let us use the “*” wildcard character in the criteria editor. It expects us to enter a number or a date.
Since latitude and longitude are both numbers, we need to use a slightly different technique. We will make us of some of the more advanced features of the HoudahSpot search field. This is located in the toolbar of the search window.
Use HoudahSpot to create lists of files. For example, you could create a list of …
HoudahSpot can save search results to CSV files. These files can, for example, be imported in Apple Numbers, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets etc. Note that HoudahSpot uses the tab character as separtor beween columns.
Continue reading Create Lists of Files. Export Metadata to CSV
The HoudahSpot File Info window shows information about the currently selected search result. For folders, this includes the total size of all items contained within.
It is quite easy to use HoudahSpot to inspect other files or folders. Simply drag a file or a folder from Finder, from HoudahSpot, or any other application onto the File Info window.
You can use this technique to see the total size of a parent folder of a file you have found using HoudahSpot. Continue reading See the Total Size of a Folder
Is Macintosh HD full to the brim? Wonder what is using up all that space? With HoudahSpot, it is easy to find the culprits: large files that were recently added to your Mac. If disk space is running tight, you may want to delete or compress these files, or move them to an external disk. Continue reading Find Large Files in OS X
LaunchBar is a popular application launcher, clipboard manager, and much more.
HoudahSpot is a powerful file search tool. It takes the guesswork out of Spotlight searches and helps you find file hidden deep in the “haystack” of files accumulated over the years.
The “Search with HoudahSpot” LaunchBar action provides an elegant way to start a HoudahSpot search using LaunchBar.
