How to Search External Drives Efficiently With Alfred

[Kelson01]

Is there a way in Alfred to add a search prefix that will allow me to search external drives? I have 7 external drives and I do not want them spinning up all the time so I'm trying to find a workflow or setting that would enable me to search these drives when I choose to. It would be nice to have a prefix for all external drives and a prefix for a select external drives to speed up searching. Does anyone know if this exists? Again, I do not want my regular use of Alfred to search these drives, that would slow Alfred down significantly. 

[deanishe]

9 hours ago, Undertaker01 said:

Is there a way in Alfred to add a search prefix that will allow me to search external drives?

 

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/inputs/file-filter/

 

9 hours ago, Undertaker01 said:

I do not want my regular use of Alfred to search these drives, that would slow Alfred down significantly.

 

Indeed. You are explicitly not supposed to add them to Alfred's default scope.

 

The way Alfred is designed to work – and the way it works best – is to keep your default results limited to just your most-used items and to add other tightly-focussed searches using File Filters as described at the link above (e.g. a File Filter with keyword "pdf" to search for PDF documents in ~/Documents, a File Filter with keyword "movies" to search for video files in /Volumes/Media1 and /Volumes/Media2, etc.).