Tips For Searching For Files By Date

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some tips for searching for files on your Mac. 

If you work with a lot of files on your Mac you may want to get good at searching those files. One of the main properties of files that we use to search is the Date. Files have more than one date. There is many different ways to search for files using those dates. 

So we're going to start off here in the Finder. Yes, sure you can use Command Space and Spotlight to search for files as well. But if you know you want to find files, it's best to start in the Finder and we'll actually have more options here to search by date if we start here. 

It is always important to start where you want to search. In this case I'm looking at the Documents Folder here. I know the files I want to find are in there. If the files were instead, say, on my Archive Drive here I may click on that and start there. You always want to start in the right place. Now, you can use the Search Field here at the top right to search. This is great especially when searching by name or the contents of the file. But if you want to search by date it can be useful to just go right into the Find Utility in the Finder. You can do that by going to File, and then Find or Command F. You didn't have to enter anything here in the Search Field to get started. You can go right here where you can search for different things like it always gives you the default Kind Is Any. But you can change this from Kind to something else including something, say, like the created date which would be the date that the file was initially created.

So, if you created say a new Pages document on a certain day you could use Create A Date to search for it if you knew that date. But there are other kinds of dates that you could search for. Instead of Created Date you could choose Last Modified Date. This would be not when the file was created but the last time it was changed. So you may not remember when you initially created the file. But if you know you worked on it last on the first of the month then you can use Last Modified Date to find it. 

There are two other kinds of dates as well. One is the Last Opened Date. So this is not a property of the file but a property saved in the file system. It remembers the last time you opened this file. Even if you didn't make a change. So, if say you opened it yesterday at 9:00, you made a change and saved it a 9:30, the last modified date would be 9:30 yesterday. The last opened date would be 9:00 yesterday. 

Now there is a fourth date that you can also use. If you don't see any of these dates here in this list or you want that 4th date you can go to Other here. You can search for these. So, for instance, to find last opened you can search for that and you can see here that there's a checkmark next to it, meaning it is always going to show up in that menu. So it is handy to check the search items that you want to appear there. In this case I want to look for Date Added. I want to add this to the menu as well. Now, I can look here and see in addition to the other dates, Date Added. 

Date Added is a special date that tells you when the file was placed in its current location. So this could be the same as the Date Created if you created the file, saved it, and have never moved. But if you moved it one folder to another Date Added would change. Also, when you download a file Date Added is useful because it will give you the date it was placed in your Downloads folder. Not the date it was originally created from wherever you downloaded it from. 

Now whichever one of these you choose, let's choose Date Created here, you can now search using a variety of different methods related to the Date. So, for instance, here it starts you within the last and then you can give it a number of days. You can also give it a number of weeks, months, or years. The idea here is if I want to find all the files that were created within the last, say, 30 days either on my Mac or remember we started in the Documents Folders so now we have that as an option here, we can get a list of all those files like that. But that's not the only way to search by date. You could search for Exactly and give an exact date. You can use these little arrows here and select things like the month, day, and year and go through these to change the date here. So, for instance here I can see on February 5th a bunch of different files were created. Now you can also use the date there with before and after instead. So this would take that date and just give you things that were created before this day. Then you can do After as well. Let's go to the 4th so we can see everything created after February 4th. 

There also are some easy ways to search, say, for today if you like, or yesterday or this week, meaning starting on Sunday. This month starting on the 1st of the month. This year starting on January 1 of this year. 

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Now no matter which one of these you choose notice that, for instance, if I choose within the last 30 days I don't necessarily get them in the order in which they were created. The order is set by the list of view columns here. In this case, I've got Name, Kind, and Date Last Opened, not created date. So, if I want to Sort By Created Date, which seems to make the most sense here, I want to add the Created Date Column. So I can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click anywhere here at the top and in the Column Heading. Then I can add Date Created. I can also go to View, and Show View Options or Command J, and add date created there as well. 

So now I've got the Created Date and I can Sort By Date Created. Clicking it again changes the order of the sort. So, for instance, if I change to Date Last Modified here and say that's within the last 30 days I get a lot of results. But I can only sort by Date Created or Date Last Opened unless I add Date Modified to this. Now I can Sort By Date Modified in either direction by clicking again and again here. 

So what if I want to get files that were say created or modified within a range. These options don't give me that. I can do within the last 30 days but I can't say do it last month or a specific range that doesn't include today. Well the way to do that is you can add multiple items here. So I'm going to say I want the last modified date is before and let's say February 1st. Then I'm going to click the Plus button here on the right and say the Last Modified Date is Also After and then give it say January 1st. Now I get files that were modified between those two dates. It doesn't matter which one I started with. I could have done after first and then before if I wanted. You don't have to choose the same type of date either. So, for instance, I could look for files that haven't been modified this year at all, but were created before and say the beginning of the previous year. So files much older than a year old that I haven't modified this year yet. You can use any of the different dates here to get some interesting results that could help you with your work. 

What's interesting is that you can actually search for a date using the Search Field here at the top right. You just got to know what to type. If you use date colon and then you put a date or just type a date in there it's actually going to search for some metadata inside the file that is not as useful as you would think. A lot of files just don't have that information in there. But if you use Created and then colon and then with no space you put a date, like that, then it will do the same as adding an item here with the Plus button. So you can see everything here was created on February 5th. If you want to do Modified you just use Modified rather than Created. You would think you would do Opened or something like that here but in fact there is no kind of shortcut word for Last Opened. You have to use the actual property which has the text KMD item last used date, all spelled out like that. Capitalization matters. Now you'll get Last Opened on February 5th. Likewise if you want Date Added you need to do KMD item Date Added like this for Date Added. We can see here that that gives us things where the date added was February 5th. 

Now let's go back to Created here. Let's say we want a range. It's actually really easy to do a range here. I could just put two dates with a dash 1/1/2026- like that and it's going to give me things between those dates. So if I want to include the 5th I need to go one more there. You can do the same with Modified and the other two as well. You can also use Less Than and Greater Than. So if you just want something to be after January 1st you can do greater than 1/1/2026, like that and it gives you things where the Date Created after January 1st, 2026. Reverse that and you'll see that you get things from before January 1st, 2026.

So try to learn these techniques if you find yourself often searching for files by date. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.