How to find files on your Mac, and anything else: words, photos, a moment in a video

Updated 2 November 2026

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Press ⌘Space to open Spotlight and type a file’s name or a word from inside it: Spotlight searches documents, PDFs, e-mails, notes and apps on your Mac, even without internet. For more control, search in a Finder window, where you can narrow the results by kind, date and folder. For photos and videos, search by describing what’s in them; for old conversations, use the search field in Messages.

Spotlight: the quickest way

1. Press ⌘Space, or click the magnifying glass in the menu bar.
2. Type part of the name, or words you remember from inside the document. Spotlight reads the contents of documents, PDFs and e-mails, not only their names.
3. Narrow it down with a kind: kind:pdf invoice shows only PDFs that mention “invoice”; kind:folder finds only folders.
4. Select a result and press Return to open it.

Finder search: filters and saved searches

1. Open a Finder window and press ⌘F.
2. Choose This Mac to search everywhere, or the folder you’re in.
3. Click + under the search field to add rules, such as Kind is PDF, or Last opened date is within the last 7 days.
4. Click Save to keep the search as a Smart Folder in the sidebar; it updates by itself.

Also handy: Recents in the Finder sidebar lists the files you opened lately, and ⇧⌘. (Shift-Command-period) shows hidden files in any window; press it again to hide them.

Photos and videos: describe what’s in them

The Photos app recognises what is in your pictures, so a search for “beach” or “birthday cake” works, but only inside its own library. Photos and videos copied to folders, external drives or a network drive are invisible to it, and no built-in search can look inside a video for a particular moment.

Screenshots: search by the words on them

Spotlight can find text inside images on recent versions of macOS, but screenshots pile up on the desktop under names that are little more than a date and a time. SimpleShot keeps every capture in a library you can search by the text that was on it: type “boarding pass” or a client’s name and the capture comes up. The text is recognised on the Mac.

Old messages and conversations

In Messages, use the search field at the top of the conversation list: it finds words, people, links and photos across your conversations, including the ones synced from your iPhone with Messages in iCloud. When you need to keep a whole conversation, not just find a line in it, Textbound exports it to a PDF with every message dated, which you can then search like any other document.