raining ktula

Irritating Spotlight behavior

October 21st, 2005 by ktula

There is one “feature” of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s Spotlight search that has irritated - and still is - the hell out of me. If you open an image after searching for it in Spotlight and that image happens to be in the “iPhoto Library” folder, you will notice that instead being opened by the default application (which in my case is Preview), the image is opened by iPhoto. Anyone who has more than a few thousand photos in iPhoto knows that it is a hog and it takes quite a bit of time before the image could be displayed in iPhoto.

At first, i thought i might have corrupted the preference file for iPhoto, which is in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPhoto.plist. I removed it and rebooted my Powerbook. It appeared to have worked when Preview opened the image from Spotlight. Then i ran iPhoto, which recreated the preference file. On reboot, this irritating “feature” of spotlight came back.

Then i thought may be my iPhoto application was corrupted. I trashed it and reinstalled it. Same thing. I searched through everywhere to see what could have associated those images with iPhoto even though the default application was Preview. Nothing.

Next, i searched for the same image using the find feature in Finder, which i think is essentially the same as Spotlight since i get the same search result as Spotlight. When i tried to open the image in the search result, the application was Preview! This made me realized that Spotlight is hard-coded to open up any images in the “iPhoto Library” with iPhoto, regardless if the image is imported by iPhoto or if it is moved there by other means. I did the following tests to confirm it:

1. Use Spotlight to search for an image that is known to be in the “iPhoto Library” folder.
2. Opened the image in Spotlight.
3. The image was opened by iPhoto.
4. Moved the image out of the “iPhoto Library” folder.
5. Opened the image again in Spotlight.
6. The image was opened by Preview.
7. Moved the image back into the original sub folder in the “iPhoto Library” folder.
8. Opened the image in Spotlight.
9. Again, the image was opened by iPhoto.

I then did another test to see what would happen if i move an image, which has not been imported into iPhoto, into the “iPhoto Library” folder.

1. Moved the image into “iPhoto Library” folder.
2. Searched for the image in Spotlight and opened the image.
3. iPhoto opened up but it did not display the image!!!
4. Moved the image out of the “iPhoto Library” folder.
5. Searched for the same image in Spotlight and opened the image.
6. The image was opened by Preview.

I wonder who was the smartass developer at Apple that hardcoded Spotlight to open up images in the “iPhoto Library” folder with iPhoto.  I have no doubt in my mind this is more of a result of laziness than a “feature” by the result of my second test. This would not have been such a big deal for me if there is an option in Spotlight to do “Open with…”.

To get around this “feature”, there are two ways:

1. Make sure the iPhoto preference file is removed before logging out.  If the iPhoto preference file is not there when you log in again, Spotlight will open up any images with your default app.
2. Instead of using Spotlight to search for images, use the “Find” feature of Finder.

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