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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6 Apps
For those of you still stuck with iPhoto 6, I discovered how to enable Spotlight to properly index iPhotos -- including keywords, titles and other details. I am not sure if this applies to every iPhoto 6 user, but in my iPhoto 6 application, Apple forgot to tell Spotlight what to look for. Follow these steps to fix this:
  1. Open /Applications, Control-click on iPhoto, and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
  2. In the new window that opens, locate the Contents/Info.plist file.
  3. Open TextEdit, and drag the Info.plist file onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock to open it. Please make a copy of the file before editing, just in case!
  4. At the end of the file, just before </dict></plist>, insert the following code:
    <key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
    <array>
    <dict>
    <key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
    <array>
    <string>public.data</string>
    </array>
    <key>UTTypeDescription</key>
    <string>iPhoto Spotlight file</string>
    <key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
    <string>com.apple.iPhoto.ipspot</string>
    <key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
    <dict>
    <key>public.filename-extension</key>
    <string>ipspot</string>
    </dict>
    </dict>
    </array>
  5. Save the file as a plain-text file, and make sure the file ending is not hidden and that the full name is Info.plist. Then wait for Spotlight to do its magic. You may have to delete the iPhoto.ipspot file in your iPhoto Library folder, and then open iPhoto, to trigger the update.
Someone reported that their iPhoto stopped working after they edited the file. If this happens, just replace the edited file with the backup you made, and iPhoto should be fine again. (This hint originally appeared on my blog.)
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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6 | 6 comments | Create New Account
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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6
Authored by: Solarusdude on Oct 01, '08 11:01:20PM

It seems that shortly after I installed the latest update to OS 10.5.5, Spotlight no longer updates the indexes for any of my image metadata in iPhoto such as the keywords. I have iPhoto 7.1.4. I tried resetting the index and that only only erased any of the existing keywords that were already indexed in Spotlight. I can still search directly in iPhoto though. Is there a similar fix listed in the article above that will work for iPhoto 7.1.4?



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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6
Authored by: grischa on Oct 02, '08 04:31:35AM
Hi, I am the author of the article.

Re iPhoto 7:
I don't have iPhoto 7, unfortunately.
However, you can try the following to test if this is your problem as well.

In Terminal run: mdls ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/iPhoto.ipspot
Then check the value of kMDItemContentType. It should be "com.apple.iphoto.ipspot".
If it is not (possibly some meaningless characters), then my fix may help. If it is, then you have a different problem.

Good Luck

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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6
Authored by: megabulk on Oct 02, '08 08:59:57AM
Great tip, but there's a typo in the code. The final </code> tag is erroneous.

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iPhoto 5
Authored by: magnamous on Oct 02, '08 02:45:45PM

Just an FYI for anyone wanting to try this in iPhoto 5: it didn't seem to work for me. I wish it did. :(



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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6
Authored by: grischa on Oct 02, '08 05:16:26PM
Sorry, yes there is a typo.
"</code>" is part of the formatting HTML code for code display. It is not supposed to be there...

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Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6
Authored by: robg on Oct 02, '08 05:26:03PM

This is fixed now; sorry about that.

-rob.



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