Where have all of my file notes gone?
December 4, 2011 9:26 PM Subscribe
How can I recover missing spotlight comments in Mac OS X, Version 10.6.8?
I'm in the middle of a huge photo project for work. Last week we went through and wrote captions for a ton of photos, saving them all as spotlight comments. I went to work on our next set of photos today and all of the comments are gone.
Is there any way to recover them? Any way at all? What would have made them disappear in the first place?
I'm in the middle of a huge photo project for work. Last week we went through and wrote captions for a ton of photos, saving them all as spotlight comments. I went to work on our next set of photos today and all of the comments are gone.
Is there any way to recover them? Any way at all? What would have made them disappear in the first place?
Response by poster: All of the files are on the hard drive of my Macbook Pro. I have no idea how to look at the index, much less rebuild it. Help?
posted by Kimothy at 9:44 PM on December 4, 2011
posted by Kimothy at 9:44 PM on December 4, 2011
Best answer: Did you happen to move the files? That'll cause the comments to be lost from the Spotlight database.
Open up Terminal.app, navigate to the directory where the images are stored, pick one, and type:
In the result, look for a field called
If it's there, then you're in luck - running
(According to the man page, the
If that works, you should be able to do something like
posted by Pinback at 11:59 PM on December 4, 2011
Open up Terminal.app, navigate to the directory where the images are stored, pick one, and type:
mdls FILENAME
In the result, look for a field called
kMDItemFinderComment
- it should contain the comment for that file.If it's there, then you're in luck - running
mdimport -n FILENAME
should restore the comment in Finder.(According to the man page, the
-n
switch is for debugging and doesn't actually change any attributes - but it does seem to restore comments to the Spotlight index. Go figure…)If that works, you should be able to do something like
mdimport -n *.jpg
(or whatever your image type is) to restore the comments for all of the images, but I haven't tried it…posted by Pinback at 11:59 PM on December 4, 2011
Response by poster: I have no idea how to use terminal... how do I navigate? I tried variations on "find" but nothing so far... I hate to admit my lack of tech savvy, but I'm really clueless here.
posted by Kimothy at 9:17 PM on December 5, 2011
posted by Kimothy at 9:17 PM on December 5, 2011
It's not hard to learn to use the Terminal, but it's also not necessary. If you follow the instructions I linked to, just above, it will reindex your spotlight comments and get them back for you and it doesn't involve the Terminal app. I don't think Pinback's approach will get you anything more than what you'd get back from reindexing.
posted by alms at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2011
posted by alms at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2011
Yeah - the only thing my approach will do is tell you if the data's there to be re-indexed, or if it's totally disappeared for some reason.
posted by Pinback at 4:00 PM on December 6, 2011
posted by Pinback at 4:00 PM on December 6, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks alms... but it's a dead link. I didn't mention it before because I was hoping the terminal thing would pan out. I'll dm you.
posted by Kimothy at 4:27 PM on December 13, 2011
posted by Kimothy at 4:27 PM on December 13, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks to you both. I finally figured out how to navigate terminal a little and found the files. Luckily most of my comments were still there! (Yay!) However importing them in any way, didn't seem to do anything. I had to copy the comments and paste them into a document one by one. At least it all worked out. :)
posted by Kimothy at 3:26 PM on December 18, 2011
posted by Kimothy at 3:26 PM on December 18, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by alms at 9:34 PM on December 4, 2011