How you can actually find things with Spotlight

Mac tip of the week…

The Spotlight search engine is a really useful feature of Mac OS X, providing an easy way to open your files, email messages etc. But suppose you want to do something other than open them: how do you find out where they actually are? Is it showing you the copy on your internal drive, or your external drive? What other things are in the same folder? Can I copy it onto a flash drive?

A quick note for new Mac users: the ‘Option’ key is labelled ‘Alt’ on some keyboards.

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3 Comments

God bless you Quentin. That’s been aggravating me on a daily basis for as long as I can remember.

Cool! Opt-Cmd works under 10.6 too, although of course you don’t get the nice preview.

In 10.6 Snow Leopard you get the path in a popup/tooltip if you mouseover the file and wait. (And Opt-Cmd-click opens Finder at the correct place, as Spencer Bliven says.)

In 10.7 Lion it works as in 10.8 Mountain Lion.

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