Enable or disable the spotlight extension in the MACOS system settings app.
Spotlight extensions increase the third-party app discoveries, allowing you to see more app-specific materials. It is mentioned here how to enable or disable the extension in Macos.
Spotlight Apple's discovery is indexing technology, which speeds up data on your Mac or iOS device by storing metadata about files and their content.
From time to time, Macos runs a process in the background to list files and data on your storage devices. This data is stored in an index that can use the spotlight to see the data when you search in the future.
Keeping in mind the index on your data, speeds up the discoveries and allows the spotlight to detect the data you are looking for more quickly.
You can also prevent spotlight from finding specific storage volumes or folders. You can do this by adding them to the System Settings App Spotlight-> Search privacy Sheet.
Spotlight Extension for Third Party Apps
Some third-party Macos apps include the ability to provide its custom data ExtensionThese are the small section of the code that provides the app developer, which the spotlight can use to include custom data in its index.
Extension makes spotlight discoveries even faster because they explain what each app is used and how it is structured. By providing spotlight extension, the third-party apps in the effect show how to quickly and skill the data files created by those apps.
When you add a new app to your Mac, spotlight extensions are automatically added when joining the app. These are usually included in the bundle (folder) of each app/content/library/spotlight folder.
Enabling/disabled of spotlight extension for third-party apps
In Macos Sequoia, you can decide which apps you want to enable or disable the spotlight extension. Closing a spotlight extension in system settings removes the app-specific information for that app from the spotlight.
You may want to do this, for example, if you do not want to have additional knowledge about the spotlight, some app data or metadata is structured.
Note that to disable the spotlight extension Not there. Turn off the spotlight by acting those types of files. All this makes the spotlight stop due to the knowledge of the data structure of the app and internal functioning of the metadata.
To enable or disable the spotlight extension for a specific app, go to System Settings-> General-> Login Items and Extension-> Spotlight And then click small Information Button on the right. It opens the spotlight extension sheet:
Spotlight extension sheet in MACOS system settings app.
For each app listed, flip the switch to the right to enable or disable the ability of the spotlight to access the data of that app.
The Macos terminal also has many command-line spotlight utilities that you can use, such as mdutil And mdfindFor more information about how to use command-line spotlight utilities of Macos, see our previous articles how to use the metadata file utilities of the spotlight in Macos and how to get more than the Spotlight on Mac.
If you are a developer, be sure to read the main spotlight foundation API Apple Documentation and Core Services Documentary File Matadata section.
The two main sections you are working is NSMetadataQuery And NSMetadataItem,
Keep in mind that writing spotlight extension and using spotlight search API in your app are two different things.
Next, read the quite a dated spotlight importer programming guide and file metadata search programming guide.
If you are using core data, see core data spotlight integration programming guide.