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Alfred can't see one particular folder


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Hi all,

 

Brand new Alfred user here. I have a folder in Dropbox that should be visible to Alfred. I can find other path-adjacent folders with no trouble. But this folder doesn't appear in Alfred.

 

I can browse to it in Alfred.

 

This folder is called "Logos" and the Alfred search for "Logos" returns other hits, but things that should be lower down in search results—items that have "logos" midway through their filenames, for example.

 

What am I missing?

 

Thanks!

Jack

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Hi all,

 

Brand new Alfred user here. I have a folder in Dropbox that should be visible to Alfred. I can find other path-adjacent folders with no trouble. But this folder doesn't appear in Alfred.

 

I can browse to it in Alfred.

 

This folder is called "Logos" and the Alfred search for "Logos" returns other hits, but things that should be lower down in search results—items that have "logos" midway through their filenames, for example.

 

What am I missing?

 

Thanks!

Jack

 

There are several things that could be causing this. First, have you tried walking through the steps located here? The steps tend to solve most similar issues. If this doesn't solve the issue, report back and let us know and we'll try to figure out where things are going wrong

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Hi all,

 

Have you also scrolled down the results to see whether the Logos folder you're looking for is there? If there are more than 9 results, scroll down to view the rest :)

 

Alfred shows results in the most relevant order possible, but if you find the folder and open it, he'll learn that this is more interesting to you than certain other "Logos" files/folders and you'll find that it'll come up higher in the results next time. 

 

If it doesn't seem to behave as I'm describing, let us know and we'll help you work out why. 

 

Cheers,

Vero

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There are several things that could be causing this. First, have you tried walking through the steps located here? The steps tend to solve most similar issues. If this doesn't solve the issue, report back and let us know and we'll try to figure out where things are going wrong

 

Hi David, thanks, yes, I have tried this. No change.

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Have you also scrolled down the results to see whether the Logos folder you're looking for is there? If there are more than 9 results, scroll down to view the rest :)

 

Alfred shows results in the most relevant order possible, but if you find the folder and open it, he'll learn that this is more interesting to you than certain other "Logos" files/folders and you'll find that it'll come up higher in the results next time. 

 

If it doesn't seem to behave as I'm describing, let us know and we'll help you work out why. 

 

Cheers,

Vero

 

Hi Vero, thanks for the tip. My result does not show anywhere in the list, even when I scroll down. There are about 20 hits.

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Hi Vero, thanks for the tip. My result does not show anywhere in the list, even when I scroll down. There are about 20 hits.

 

Hi Jack, sorry for the slow reply! 

 

Could you please try renaming your folder, leaving it a moment, then renaming it to its original name? If it isn't turning up in search results, there may be some metadata missing for it and renaming it will force OS X to reindex it. :)

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Could you please try renaming your folder, leaving it a moment, then renaming it to its original name? If it isn't turning up in search results, there may be some metadata missing for it and renaming it will force OS X to reindex it. :)

 

Hi Vero, thanks for your reply! I can't reproduce the issue any more, but I will try this if it recurs. Thanks!

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  • 2 months later...

Hi Jack, sorry for the slow reply! 

 

Could you please try renaming your folder, leaving it a moment, then renaming it to its original name? If it isn't turning up in search results, there may be some metadata missing for it and renaming it will force OS X to reindex it. :)

 

 

Hi Vero,

 

This problem is back with a new folder. If I rename it, I can find it under the new name. If I change it back, Alfred doesn’t see it.

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You can try forcing Spotlight to re-index it via Terminal:

mdimport -d 1 /path/to/your/folder/here

If that doesn't work, try changing the number after -d to show more information (1-4). Use man mdimport for more info.

 

 

Thanks, deanishe. The problem had resolved itself by the time I started this. Is this a known issue? Why is this happening to me?

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The metadata indexing system is complex and therefore prone to occasional errors. Things can get missed or not updated because most of the metadata is cached. It's possible that Dropbox didn't update the modification time of the folder, so the metadata indexer didn't recognise it as changed and reindex it.

 

Forcing it to reindex things it hasn't indexed properly, up to and including deep-sixing the entire index if necessary, will usually kick-start it back into action.

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The metadata indexing system is complex and therefore prone to occasional errors. Things can get missed or not updated because most of the metadata is cached. It's possible that Dropbox didn't update the modification time of the folder, so the metadata indexer didn't recognise it as changed and reindex it.

 

Forcing it to reindex things it hasn't indexed properly, up to and including deep-sixing the entire index if necessary, will usually kick-start it back into action.

 

Aha. So does Alfred share the same indexing system as Spotlight? If Spotlight can see it, Alfred can?

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Same index subsystem, but Alfred works with a much smaller subset of the index by default, and in different ways.
 
At any rate, you can debug (and hopefully fix) problems with both of them using the metadata command-line tools mdls (which shows the metadata for a file) and mdimport (which reindexes files).
 
mdfind is also a very cool tool, allowing you to search the index from the command line and scripts.

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