Where have all of my file notes gone?

December 4, 2011 9:26 PM

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?

posted by Kimothy to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

How is the disk connected to the computer? I've had problem viewing spotlight comments when connected to a disk as a network drive. If I connect the disk directly to a computer and rebuild the spotlight index, the comments become visible again.
posted by alms at 9:34 PM on December 4, 2011

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

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: 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

How to reindex your Spotlight comments.
posted by alms at 6:38 AM on December 5, 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

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

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

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

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