Question for the Mac gurus

I've bought a simple iMac to get my feet wet. I'm learning to work with it now. After 30 years of Windows, it's not always that easy.

I'm currently having the following issue:

I've made 2 profiles : one for me and one for my wife. The main reason I did this is because I want to be able to manage both the music on our iPhones manually. I copied all the music from my pc via my LAN to my 'music' folder. I quickly found out that that way, my wife couldn't reach the music. So I copied it to the 'shared' folder (I hope I'm translating the correctly ; I'm using the Mac in Dutch), this is the folder you'll find on the same level as where the user's home folders reside.

After I found out how to set the folder permissions, I could also reach the files from my wife's profile, so all was good.

There's just one problem: when I'm logged into my wife's profile, it seems Finder doesn't want to search this shared folder. If I search for 'Abba' eg. in the correct folder, it doesn't find anything. If I clear the search field, I can see the folder clearly there. This is ONLY so when I'm logged in as my wife. When I log in in my own profile, Finder finds the Abba folders just fine.

What could be causing this? And how can I solve it? I keep thinking it's a file permission thing of some sort, but my wife has the exact same permissions files as I have. The files can be played no problem, just not searched.

The Mac is running the most recent version of the OS. Thanks!

I am the complete opposite of a Mac guru. I needed help just to find out where the on/off button was on my wife's iMac.

But... you can manage your music manually on your iPhones using a Windows computer with a free program called CopyTrans Manager It works very well.

tanstaafl.

Thanks Doug! I know this program. I've even bought a license for it. It's indeed pretty good, but it's not a true solution to my problem.

I want SWMBO to be able to manage her own iPhone's mp3 files using her own Mac.

This is possible already, but it's made more difficult for her because the search doesn't seem to work in Finder. So she can't search for specific tracks now.
I'm guessing this is one of those stupid issues that's easy enough to solve, if you know how. Google hasn't given me any answers to this problem specific.

Taking a random guess, maybe Spotlight isn't indexing the Shared folder for her for some reason ?

Googling for this is hard, as all the results returned are about Spotlight and shared network drives

I should say that Spotlight search has never worked well for me, one of the things about OSX that I've never liked. I'll regularly find that it won't match a file name that I know exists.

In fact, right now, doing some testing I reproduced can't find a file issue. In my /Users/Shared folder is a folder called Cordova and in that is a folder called Cordova.framework. Spotlight will find the Cordova folder, but not the Cordova.framework one. I have no idea why.

Not that Windows search is any better, I end up using Agent Ransack to search for files on Windows.

Yes, that was my idea too. But I can't seem to find where I can point Spotlight to this folder specifically. I did find where I can exclude it from a search though, but that's the opposite of what I want.

Also, I've learned that there seems to be a difference between the search via Spotlight (top right of the screen) and the search in Finder. In general, Spotlight tends to find a lot more stuff than finder does (but not in this case sadly).


Indeed. I've noticed this very same thing.



That's also one of the suggestions I found through Google: somebody said to use a different search program. If I don't find the issue, I might as well go with that. Shame though...

It has just occurred to me that if you are managing music to sync to the iPhone you should just be searching in iTunes instead. Import all the music into iTunes (being sure to tell it not to move the files). Then search in the iTunes UI.

This is exactly what I do to manually manage the music on my phone. However I don't actually use the "Manually manage music" option. I didn't find that worked too well. What I do instead is use smart playlists to determine what music gets synced to my phone.

When you add new music you can just ask iTunes to reimport the root folder for your music, it won't import duplicates.it

The way I would try to address this, is to just set liberal directory (aka "folder") permissions on the shared stuff, and then symlink that directory onto both of your Desktops.

I don't have a MAC to test that with though. (actually, I do have a MAC, but it runs Linux, not MacOS).

Well whadayaknow... I just tried again... still didn't work, but I let the search parameter "Abba" sit in the search window while I was Googling for a solution to this problem on my pc. After 10 minutes, all of a sudden, the files popped up! Now, all files can be found, just like it should be. Yay!

So my guess is the mac was still indexing the files or something. (shame there is no indication of it being busy with this task anywhere!) This is different from Windows. With Windows, even when a certain folder hasn't been indexed yet, it will still search, albeit a lot slower because it'll run past each and every file.

Oh well, it seems this problem had fixed itself. How often does something like that happen?

That would be a good solution too Mark, but I have no idea what symlinks are. We don't have those on Windows.

Edit: Well, after reading up on them, I guess we do. But they are command line stuff only, so I've never used them.

But how would this be different from the current situation: a folder which both users can access with the same rights? I'm guessing that folder would still need to be indexed for a search to work?

Oh, I missed your later update where the search indexing suddenly appears to be working. So all good there, then!

MS-Win does NOT have symlinks. It has "aliases", which only work in the GUI. symlinks are a lower level filesystem thing, not a special case just for the desktop.

They're actually pretty simple, too: just a string substitution.

A symlink is a directory entry, whose contents are a string. When the symlink's name is used, the filesystem substitutes that stored string in place of it.

That's it. Very very simple, and amazingly powerful.

Cheers

Yes it does: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194(v=ws.11).aspx

Yeah, I've used symlinks before. I've even fooled Dropbox into thinking folders were inside it that weren't.

Ahh.. added in Vista, I guess.
Thanks for the correction!

Frameworks are considered system files and excluded from search results by default. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202121 has steps to enable showing system files in the results.

*edit* Smart Folders come in handy for saving custom search results such as a smart folder dedicated to searching system files. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19078 details how to create them. Smart Folders and Mailboxes in Mail were something that solidified my preference for OS X when Spotlight was launched.

Another notable aspect of frameworks is that they are the only type of bundle on the system that Finder will treat as a normal folder.

Spotlight used to have an indicator when it was still working on a large indexing operation such as the first scan, I'm not sure why it's faded away with more recent OS releases.

If you want a hint that indexing is running, you can open up Activity Monitor and search for processes called "mdworker" using the CPU. You should see at least one, and if under the View menu you turn on All Processes, one or more per user on the machine tends to appear.