Spotlight Comments and Smart Folder Searches
October 29th, 2006 by brush
If you have not used Smart Folders in Mac Tiger, then I can recommend taking a look. Just select New Smart Folder from the Finder File menu and explore the possibilities.
Knowing first hand how difficult it is to keep tabs on the properties and other info. relating to specific brush variants, I came up with a system using a saved Smart Folder to search for Spotlight Comments pre-assigned to individual variant xml files via. the Get Info dialogue (alternatively use the Automator workflow described here). For search purposes, each individual comment is separated using the pipe symbol (no spaces) as shown in the above screenshot.
A Smart Folder was then created to search for multiple spotlight comments (also shown in the above screenshot). You can use one or more of the comment search fields in the finder, and incorporating the pipe symbol along with the search term forces exact string searches (not case sensitive). The multiple search fields act as an AND gate, meaning all individual comment search matches must be true to return a result.
To aid memory (mine), I also created a Brush Comments Key list as a text file, and assigned an xml file extension. By assigning every possible comment used with the variant files in the comments for this file, it shows up in the searches (for double click access in BBEdit).
In my example the comments/abbreviations used are as follows;
|d| (a default variant).
|acrylics| (Acrylics default brush category).
|7.0| (Brush definition number (the variant was saved in Painter 7).
|brush loading| (Brush Loading= checked).
|adsc| (Auto-Dab short cut supported).
The system can easily be used to generate lists of variants sharing the same search criteria. To save the search results as a text file, Command+A to select all in the Finder results window. Command +C to copy the results to the clipboard, then Command+V to paste into a text document.