Two Useful Things I've Done with Spotlight
I like Spotlight. That is, I like it now that I’ve figured out how to use it in a few ways that work for me. Initially, like many people, I thought it would be able to replace Quicksilver (or LaunchBar, or Butler), but that is simply not the case, and now that I’ve figured out some of the things that Spotlight is good at, and some of the things it is not, I am finding it to be quite useful.
I tend to change my desktop background whenever the mood hits me. I might change it several times per day, or I might not change it for weeks on end. I also typically don’t use the Desktop & Screen Saver pref pane’s automatic background cycling feature since I like my background to fit my mood, and I don’t always know what that will be!
I had made several attempts to organize my rather large collection of desktop backgrounds into folders. I had a Star Trek folder, an Abstract Art folder, a Black and White Photos folder, and so on, but I found that I had many images that fit into multiple categories. That, in essence, is the general argument for a relatively flat hierarchy with tagging or keywords versus a deep folder-based hierarchy. It’s the reason one uses [del.icio.us] over bookmark folders. So I decided to add keywords to all my background images (using a simple Automator workflow to add them in batches). Now I have one Background Images folder where one image might have several keywords, such as “scifi”, “startrek”, “starship”, etc. Now I can open a Finder window to my Background Images folder and easily search for “starships” and, through the magic of the Finder & Spotlight, find all images that have starships in them, be they Star Trek, Star Wars, Anime, etc.
I also have a rather extensive collection of Orthodox Liturgical sheet music on my laptop, mostly in PDF format. Again, previously, I had tried to organize these PDFs into a hierarchical folder structure based on the particular service or Feast to which they apply, and again, this was too limiting. What if I wanted to find all sheet music in the Byzantine style? Or all the Kontakia sung during Lent in Russian style? Spotlight keywords to the rescue. I added keywords such as “lent”, “byzantine”, “kontakion”, etc. Now I can do much more refined searches, such as those mentioned above. This has proven to be extremely useful in managing my sheet music collection.
Using Spotlight keywords has been at least one answer to my nagging question of “Yeah, but how do all these things really help me be more efficient in life and work?” with Tiger.
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