Find a file on an external drive?

[Gary King]

How can I use Alfred to find a file on an external drive? Alfred doesn't seem to want to show ANY files on my external drives, even though they are indexed by Spotlight. It doesn't even want to show the drive itself.

 

The drive's name is "Data" and I tried "find Data" with no luck.

[Gary King]

Nevermind figured it out by adding the external drive to the search scope. I thought that that box was just for folders that I wanted Alfred to index, and if it couldn't find the file there, then it would use Spotlight for other folders. I guess not?

[Vero]

Nevermind figured it out by adding the external drive to the search scope. I thought that that box was just for folders that I wanted Alfred to index, and if it couldn't find the file there, then it would use Spotlight for other folders. I guess not?

 

Alfred uses OS X's index, so adding paths to the search scope tells Alfred where you want him to look. Adding the external drive is the right way to include it in your Alfred search.

 

You could also create a file filter workflow if you want to specifically search for files on your external drive without seeing anything from your main drive. Here's a tutorial on creating file filters:

http://blog.alfredapp.com/2014/04/24/tutorial-creating-an-alfred-workflow-without-a-single-line-of-code/

[espen96]

Hi, Vero. Do you have a solution for this for macOs Mojave? Since Alfred relies on the Spotlight indexing, I was told I had to enable indexing of the network share. It worked for a while, but somehow it seems that the indexing was disabled on the newer macOS versions…