Recently we had been having some problems with the program Deep showing all of the photo files in some of our directories. Deep works off of the Spotlight index and we learned we needed to rebuild this index. So we set about doing this. You can use a UNIX command, however, we elected instead to use the Spotlight GUI in System Preferences. Here are our disks. We want to add Media disk to Spotlight to have its index rebuilt.

All we needed to do was add the disk to the Privacy tab, and

Then remove it and it will begin to re-index the disk or folder. However, while this solution uses standard Mac tools, over time we found it to be not as reliable as we would like. Therefore we went searching for some add on that could help us manage our index for us. We found one in Spotless.

You select a drive and then delete the entire Index Directory, and then rebuild. It works very well. After this is done, we notice that Spotlight finds things quickly and extremely fast. From the difference we conclude that basic Spotlight as shipped with Apple has some type of maintenance issue and it does not index and reindex drives properly. Why this is not brought up more often in articles about Spotlight we can not be sure.

Computer Speed

The great thing about getting Spotlight working, which is something we did not consider, is that the overall computer runs faster as it is spending less time with online searching, and is performing the searching in batch mode before the fact.