Setting Spotlight Comments
Once you've run a search and you have some items displayed in the Search Results pane of the Meta Search Window, you can edit that item's Spotlight comments. Using this feature, you can add values to your item's metadata without changing the contents of the file at all, making it easy for you to add comments or phrases that you can search on later. There are two options available for setting Spotlight comments: editing and appending.
To edit a Spotlight comment, just select the item in the Search Results pane and select "Edit Spotlight Comment" from the Actions menu:
Once you've done that, Meta will display the Edit Spotlight Comment window. That window will contain any Spotlight comments that already existed. To change the value of the item's Spotlight comments, just type your comments into the text area in that window, like this:
Once you're done making changes, press the Update button to save them. Or, if you don't want to save your changes, press the Cancel button.
To append some text to an existing comment (or add a new comment if one doesn't already exist) select the item in the Search Results pane and select "Append Spotlight Comment" from the Actions menu:
Meta will display the Append Spotlight Comment window. To append some text to the end of the item's Spotlight comment, just type in your additional comments into the text area in the window, like this:
Once you're done making changes, press the Update button to save them. Or, if you don't want to save your changes, press the Cancel button.
Learning More: Searching For Spotlight Comments
You can search for values in your items' Spotlight Comments using the comment search tag, like this:
comment:*important*That search, for example, would find all the documents on your computer with the word "important" in their Spotlight comments.
Learning More: Spotlight Tagging
The ability to edit and search on Spotlight comments can be used to roll your own Spotlight tagging system. Similar to the way tags are used by del.icio.us or other online services, tags can be used to categorize the items on your computer.
For instance, if you wanted to be able to keep track of all the files you're using for a particular project, you could add a tag for that project to the Spotlight comments of those files as you create them. Then you'll never lose track of them again, even if they move from one folder to another on your computer.
To give a concrete example, say you decide to use the tag "kid_design" to keep track of the files for your web site redesign project for Kid Co. All you need to do to make this happen is add the word "kid_design" to the files associated with that project. Then, when you want to find all the files for that project a little later on, you can just search for that tag in the comment search tag, like this:
comment:*kid_design*That search will show you all the files you've tagged with the "kid_design" tag, regardless of where they are on your computer, making it really easy to keep track of them all.
Learning More: Editing or Appending Spotlight Comments For Multiple Files
Meta's Spotlight comment editing capability allows you to edit Spotlight comments for multiple files in one shot. To do so, just highlight the files in the Search Results pane that you want to edit by Shift-clicking or Command-clicking, like this:
Then select "Edit Spotlight Comment" from the Actions menu. Once you've done that, you can edit the Spotlight comments in the Edit Spotlight Comment window, and when you press the Update button to save your changes, the comments will be applied to all the files you've selected.
Similar steps can be taken to append a comment to multiple files. Simple Shift-click or Command-click to select some files, and select "Append Spotlight Comment" from the Actions menu. Once you've done that, you can add a new comment in the Append Spotlight Comment window, and when you press the Update button to save your changes, the new comment will be appended to the Spotlight comment of each selected file.
In practice, its usually easier to append a new comment to multiple files than to edit the comment for multiple files.