When you open HoudahSpot – and have not yet changed the default setup – you will see three preconfigured search criteria in the Refine section:
Continue reading What Search Criteria are Available in HoudahSpot?
We’ve been dreaming about trekking to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro for quite some time. Last October, we finally made the trip. Climbing Africa’s highest mountain, crossing its different climatic zones and finally reaching the summit was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience. We documented this unique vacation by taking hundreds of photos – and by recording a track log.
Continue reading Photos & Track Log: Documenting an 8-day Kilimanjaro Trek
The Services feature in macOS allows you to quickly perform actions – no matter what application you’re working in. HoudahSpot provides the following Services to start new searches from right where you currently are:
Services are available system-wide. Just choose Services from any application’s main menu or from the context menu. Assigning a keyboard shortcut to a Service makes access even faster.
Continue reading macOS Services: Quick Access to Searching with HoudahSpot
In macOS, it’s possible to hide folders. The user Library folder, for example, is hidden by default. Hidden folders are invisible to the Finder and don’t show up in open/save dialog boxes.
What can you do if you need to access a hidden folder, e.g. when searching for a specific file within? Continue reading How to Access Hidden Folders
In Mac OS X’s Finder, you can save searches as “Smart Folders”. These give you quick access to all your files that meet certain criteria. For example, all Microsoft Word files modified this month. All JPG photos taken with a specific camera. Or all e-mails you’ve received from certain senders within the last seven days.
Because Mac OS X Smart Folders are actually saved searches, they differ from regular folders: they don’t actually hold anything – they only list files stored elsewhere. The content of Smart Folder is not static but dynamic. It is updated continuously as new files come to meet the smart folder’s search criteria. This means that its content changes every time files on your Mac are added, changed, or removed.
With HoudahSpot (4.1 or later), you can easily set up a search and export it as a Finder Smart Folder.
Continue reading Save HoudahSpot Searches as Finder Smart Folders
In HoudahSpot, snippets let you to set aside frequently used combinations of search criteria. HoudahSpot comes with a few pre-installed snippets, but you can also define your own.
Snippets can hold a single search criterion or a group of criteria that serve a certain purpose. The pre-installed snippet “Date Created range”, for example, holds two criteria in an “All of the following are true” group: “Content created before” and “Content created after”. Use this snippet whenever you want to find files created in a range of dates.
The Places feature introduced in HoudahGeo 5 allows you to save frequently used locations as favorites. This makes manual geotagging – picking locations from a map – way more efficient.
Places can be used in two different ways: as presets for location coordinates and names or as map bookmarks. Continue reading Efficient Geotagging: HoudahGeo’s Places Feature
In HoudahSpot, you can temporarily disable individual search criteria. This is particularly useful in combination with templates: have different criteria preconfigured, enable them as needed. Continue reading Stash Extra Criteria in Search Templates
With HoudahGeo 5, it’s now even easier to create and share a map with your photos. HoudahGeo publishes photos and track logs on Dropbox. You can then view these in Google My Maps.
This is what your results can look like:
Click on the thumbnail images in the map to see the photo and additonal information. The red line is the path we travelled – recorded on a GPS track logging device.
Geotags are metadata information added to a file, in our case an image file. They usually take the form of GPS coordinates. Additionally, location names like city, state and country can be written to metadata.
By adding geotags to your photos, you basically “pin” them to the places they were taken. There are good reasons to consider geotagging your photos: Continue reading Why Geotag Photos?
