Though I have a erotic love / hate relationship with Spotlight , there are times when its features come in handy . Consider this example . A guest has station you a CD with a few hundred images to use in a Modern World Wide Web site blueprint , and you ’ve copy the CD ’s contents to a brochure on your hard drive . When you launch the folder in the Finder , you see a structure like this :
This structure goes on and one , with a few images in each subfolder . unluckily , your business organizes images by client and projection : Client XYZ - > Project ABC - > Images . So your task is to take all of the client - provided images , inhume in multiple subdirectories , and move them all into the proper project - related Images booklet . What makes this a bit of a task , of course , is the fact that the images are spread throughout legion folders .
There are many good ways to accomplish this labor , but I ’ll give you one you may not have deliberate : apply Spotlight . When you operate a Spotlight hunting in the Finder , the results are presented in one window , regardless of where the located file actually lodge in . We can use this behavior to make it really simple to group our wide - break up file .
Navigate to the booklet where the file you ’d like to group are located , then press Command - F to touch off the Finder ’s hunt mode . When the search options appear , notice that it ’s already default to searching within the brochure you selected . You ’ll also see the two default option hunting standard ( Kind — Any and Last Opened — Any Date ) .
At this point , there are two slipway to proceed , bet on whether you ’re trying to aggroup all files , or just some that share a given equipment characteristic , such as part of their filename .
All Files
If you need to grab every single single file within a booklet structure , it ’s quite simple . First take out the Last Opened — Any Date criteria by clicking the minus sign next to its incoming in the Finder windowpane . Then flick the Kind drop curtain - down for the remaining criterion , and alter it to Size . Leave the new Greater than drop - down exactly as it is , and then put 0 into the text airfield :
As soon as you type the 0 , Spotlight will start searching and return essentially every data file ( since you told it to ascertain any file with a size dandy than zero ) within the pamphlet social organisation — include all subfolders . But the path the result are presented does n’t make it look particularly easy to take all of your Indian file . We ’ll get to that morsel in just a instant .
Shared Characteristic
In the exemplar above , all we really desire are the image file cabinet , and it seems they ’ve all been named to end with .jpg . As before , we ’ll go by removing the Last Opened — Any Date criteria . get through the Kind drop - down for the first criteria , and change it to Name . Then fructify the next bead - down to Ends With , and eccentric .jpg in the text comment corner , like this :
Obviously , you could change and add criteria as necessary to jibe what you require to find in the folder structure . limelight start seek as before long as you give it a valid touchstone to search with , and soon , all of the matches will appear in the window .
So what now ?
Regardless of which search you ran , you’re able to press Command - A to select everything in the Finder ’s lookup upshot window , and then just sweep and overlook it to its final finish . This work dandy if you searched only for files that matched a certain criteria .
If you search for all file , though , then the Command - A method will also copy all the parent folders and any other data file you might not require to copy . So entreat Command-2 instead ( View - > As List ) to switch to list view style . Once in inclination aspect , get across the Kind pillar heading to serve separate the files and folders , then select and copy the files you wish to imitate .
There are apparently endless variations of this technique ; the thing to keep in nous is just the general construct : Spotlight searches in the Finder will consolidate many separate folders into one “ ultra folder ” for display role . This work it super easy to then do things with these consolidated file that might otherwise be somewhat fourth dimension consume .
