Reading Spotlight Comments without using Get Info.

April 5, 2006 11:32 AM

In Mac OS X, the "Finder/Spotlight Comments" is a handy way for me to store additional information about documents. It would be great to be able to read them without having to "Get Info". In particular, I'd like to either have them show up when hovering over the document in Finder (that is, use them as Help Tags), or have them show up in the Preview pane.

If I had to choose, I'd probably prefer for the comments to show up in Preview, as this would allow me to scroll through a bunch of documents fairly quickly. Anyone have a quick fix, or a software program, that would do this? I've searched the Apple web site and Googled "help tags", but all to no avail.

posted by math to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after (maybe not, given the 'scroll though a bunch of documents' bit) but I use Smart Folders with saved searches for files tagged with various tags and combinations of tags, and it's proved a handy way to keep track of files with particular tags.

Similarly, Tagbag is a Dashboard widget which lists tags, and clicking on a tag opens a Finder window with all relevantly tagged files.
posted by jack_mo at 11:46 AM on April 5, 2006

Thanks, jack_mo, for your advice. It's not exactly what I'm after, but it does give me some ideas. I especially like the Tagbag widget.
posted by math at 12:03 PM on April 5, 2006

Switch to list view, select View Options from the View menu and enable the Comments column
posted by cillit bang at 12:26 PM on April 5, 2006

(and obviously you might want to drag it over to be next to the name column)
posted by cillit bang at 12:27 PM on April 5, 2006

Thanks, c.b. I hadn't thought of that, although since I so totally prefer column view, it'll be difficult for me to get used to list view.
posted by math at 3:08 PM on April 5, 2006