How To Rebuild the Spotlight Index on Your Mac

The Spotlight index is used to let you search for files on your Mac. If searching is not working properly you can rebuild the Spotlight index.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to rebuild your Spotlight Index. 
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So when you use a Mac you probably hear the term Spotlight a lot. Actually it  refers to several related things. So when you search for a file sometimes that is called a Spotlight Search. Also, when you use Command Space or the little magnifying glass in the Menu Bar that's called a Spotlight Menu. Now when you use either of these you're actually using something called the Spotlight Index to perform the search. So, for instance, we can use this button here or just Command Space and it brings up the Spotlight Menu. When you type a term here it is actually searching many different places including webpages, the Photos App, the Dictionary, etc. If you want to find files you certainly can sometimes see them here at the top or if you scroll down you can usually see things like Presentations or Documents. 
Now in the Finder you can start at a particular folder and click the Magnifying Glass here or you can use Command F to start a Spotlight Search and only be searching this directory here depending upon your settings. You can always switch to searching your entire Mac. But it's only going to be looking for files, no webpages, photos, or anything else. So, if I search here and press return you can see I'll get all sorts of documents here, some of which have wombat in the name, others which don't. Before I complete the search itself I do have the choice to choose just File Names or Content. So what's actually happening here is not really a search. You would imagine a search to work by your Mac looking at every single file at that location and seeing if the name matches the term or if the contents are found inside going from file to file and listing the results. That would actually take a very long time, even with today's super fast computers and hard drives. There are just so many files and it takes so long to open and look at each one. 
So instead searches are made much faster by using an index. An index is just like an index in a print book. You wouldn't search through the pages of a book when you want to find something, reading every word to find it. You would go to the index in the back, look up that word, and then it would list the page numbers where that word can be found. The Spotlight Index works the same way. It knows all the file names and the contents in every file and then indexes them. So when you type a word it can just look up the word in the index and the index would then show which files contain that word in the name or content of the file. Then it would quickly list them. 
When you first get your Mac and set it up it will generate this Spotlight Index and it will update it as you add and change files. In addition, the Spotlight Index is completely recreated from scratch, like after a major update. With all sorts of different apps that we download and add to our Macs and extensions and different ways we search and do things sometimes the Spotlight Index will break. It will get corrupted in some way and maybe you won't be able to find the files that you know are there or there could be other problems like Spotlight gets really slow or returns inconsistent results. 
So a Spotlight Search, either with Command Space or by using Command F in the Finder, isn't working for you quite right you could always try to reindex Spotlight. There's a really simple way to do this but it's not very intuitive. In macOS Ventura you want to go to System Settings. You go to System Preferences before Ventura. Then you want to look for Siri & Spotlight. Before Ventura there's just a section called Spotlight. But in either case you would look for the Privacy button. You go there you're going to see this window. You can add locations to prevent Spotlight from searching those locations. 
Now you could use this for actual Privacy reasons. For instance, if there is a folder that for some reason you never want those files to show up in searches you could hit the Plus button here and select the folder and add it. Typically there is no reasons to ever do this but occasionally there might be something like a folder filled with files created by an application and they are always showing up in your Spotlight searches. You could always add that folder there and those files will no longer bother you when you search. 
But you could also use this to reindex Spotlight. So all you would do is open up this window and then you would go to the top level, your hard drive, and then you would add this to the Privacy Settings there. Now when I do a search you're going to see nothing comes up because the index doesn't have anything from my local hard drive. So it is certainly not going to find anything in the Documents folder. So to reindex all you need to do is once you've added it, select it again, and then remove it. Now it will add it back. Now this is going to take some time. Here you can see if I do a search only a fraction of what I had before. Just the files names for now. If I do Command Space I can actually see right up here. It shows Indexing, and there's a progress bar. At the beginning the Progress Bar will do this, going back and forth, showing it is preparing. Then you may see it for a time with blue filling the entire bar. But eventually you'll see it gradually fill up the bar until it's complete. Until then you'll still find things outside of Spotlight. It will be a limited set of results and documents. It won't be until this is complete that you can be sure that you will get all the results.   
Now you may think this is a really strange way to do something on your Mac. Shouldn't there be a button there in System Settings or maybe a menu item in the Finder or something. Well, this is the way to do it! In fact Apple even has this support page right here and on this support page they show exactly this method for adding to the Privacy List and then removing it again. 
Now there are some things that you can do with Spotlight indexing in the Terminal. You could use mdutil and if you just use sa the s is going to list the status and a for all volumes. You could see her that indexing is enabled for everything. If we had checked that while the Mac hard drive was added to the Privacy List you would see it disabled for the main volume. Now you can use this command, mdutil-Ea, and that will attempt to rebuild all of the different Spotlight indexes on all of the attached volumes. You need to put pseudo in front of it because they need it to give it permission to run. It's going to prompt you for your password. But in almost all cases you shouldn't need to use this. Using the System Settings method is all that you should need to reindex Spotlight. 
Now a word about when to use this. First of all I would only rebuild your Spotlight Index if you really believe there's a problem with Spotlight. Don't do it just to see maybe if it speeds things up a little bit or something like that. There should be a clear problem, like files that are definitely there and they are definitely not showing up when you do a search. Secondly, it's going to take a while to rebuild this file by index. The ideal time to do this is at the end of day when you're not going to be using your Mac for awhile. Of course you should let your Mac sleep overnight. Don't shut it down. That is something you should be doing anyway, every night. Of course if you're using a MacBook it should be plugged into power because it is going to be busy working on this and that will drain the battery. So I hope you learned something about Spotlight Index. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Rebuild the Spotlight Index on Your Mac”

mangguo

2 years ago

In my case Spotlight refuses to work with a disk that is connected to a Windows computer and which I'm accessing through SMB:// on local network. I tried to add and remove that disk from the Privacy list but Spotlight still ignores everything there.

This actually used to work but stopped with the latest OS update. The same update also caused the external disk getting disconnected every time my Mac went to sleep (so I have to CMD+K in Finder every morning), maybe that's connected somehow?

Gary Rosenzweig

mangguo: I'm surprised it ever worked in that situation. After all, the drive is formatted for Windows, and controlled by Windows, and it would be Windows that would be responsive for answering any network requests to list or search for files on that drive over the network. Are you sure it was spotlight indexed? Or was it just that you could search it before? Anyway, I can't help you much there. As you can imagine I don't have a Windows machine to on my network to test this with.

Mark

Differences between Spotlight and the “Finder” Find are baffling. Neither can search a flash drive. Searching system files in any Library folder is mostly blocked like Prefs, Desktop Pictures, or Application Support. No way to set Find to include system files by default. But it WILL include confusing duplicate PDFs buried in Mail Downloads folders. The clunky Spotlight Privacy add/remove doesn't always start mdworker process and iCloud searches are hit/miss too.

Rod

Thanks so much Gary, my Finder Recent folder was mysteriously empty so, after watching an earlier MacMost video on searching, I added a .savedSearch folder for all files modified in the last week. After rebuilding the Spotlight index the Recent folder is working as it should.

Andrew

Rebuilt Gmail mailbox due to search being inconsistent. Now it won't find anything in that mailbox. How do I reindex just that mailbox?

Andrew: Select it on the left, then choose Mailbox, Rebuild. Then you'll need to give it a lot of time to redownload and sync things with the Gmail server.

Comments Closed.

How To Rebuild the Spotlight Index on Your Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Rebuild the Spotlight Index on Your Mac”

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