Have you purchased FAF in the Mac App Store?
You can download the version from this website and use it just the same, without having to purchase it again. This is useful if you want to try out new beta versions (available only here, not in the App Store; see right side).
Search Beyond The Spotlight
Sep 17, 2021 See hidden files on Mac via Finder. As mentioned above, it doesn’t take much to make the hidden files on your Mac visible. In fact, you can check out all of the hidden files on your Mac by following just three easy steps: In Finder, open up your Macintosh HD folder; Press Command+Shift+Dot; Your hidden files will become visible. If you’ve got an iPhone and need to find the IPSW file on Macs running OS X 10.7 Lion or above, then just follow these steps. It’s useful to know where the IPSW folder is located on your Mac because each time an iOS update is available, you can download and install the new iOS version via iTunes. Browsers typically make it easy to quickly get to downloaded files. In Safari’s case, a Download button appears in the toolbar, which you click to view a list of recent downloads. Clicking the magnifying glass button next to an item reveals the downloaded file in Finder. (Clicking the Clear button hides the Downloads button until you download. Deleting Mail Download files from a Mac One way to save space and stop mail download overload is to use an email client that makes it easier to find, organize and delete attachments. Take Unibox, for example, which groups emails by sender, making it far more intuitive and easy-to-use compared to Mail or other email services.
Find Any File is a program for Apple's macOS that lets you search for files on your disks.
- FAF can find files that Spotlight doesn't, e.g. on network (NAS) and other external volumes, hidden ones inside bundles and packages, and those in folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search, such as the System and Library folders. It can even search in other user's folders if you use FAF's unique root search mode.
- FAF lets you search precisely for many file properties such as name, extension, date range, size, kind etc.
- FAF cannot find text in PDF, Word, Excel and similar document files (unless Spotlight has indexed them, which isn't necessarily the case on external and network disks).
- FAF cannot find metadata stored in files, such as image sizes, EXIF data and GPS coordinates (check out the alternatives below for that).
Find Any File doesn't replace Spotlight, but it complements it greatly:
- If you search for files by name, size, dates, kind and other directory properties, use FAF, because only then you can be sure that everything available is found, even if Spotlight hasn't indexed it.
- FAF can also find textual contentif it's uncompressed, as in plain text files and even most binary files. And with the option to include Spotlight results, it can also find text in PDF, Word and Excel documents as long as they were indexed by Spotlight.
Not convinced yet? Read this review of FAF at MacWorld.com
See a video of Andy Ihnatko recommending FAF on the MacBreak Weekly 506 show
See the manual or simply try out FAF for free. Just download it now and pay later, if you want to keep using it.
Features
Find Any File has a few gems that other search tools do not offer:
Better results: It offers an alternative hierarchical view for the found items. You can switch to it with cmd+2 or click on the 'View' icon at the top left of the results window:
Note that the search above revealed hundreds of hits. If you'd look at that many results in a flat list, it would be hard to browse. With this new hierarchical view, however, you can directly look for the results in the folders that interest you.
Image Preview: If you're looking for pictures, the image preview browser is helpful as well (new in version 1.9):
- Find everything on your disk: If you hold the Option key (alt ⌥) down in the Find window, the Find button turns into Find All. If you click on it then, you are asked for an administrator password - and then Find Any File will restart in root mode, being able to find really any file on your Mac's volumes, including files in other users' home directories (something that Spotlight won't do). Note that this will only work on local disks, not on network mounts, though.
- You can save your entered searches to files (they'll have the extension '.faf'). You can then double click them in the Finder to have them start the search immediately, or use the saved search as a preset.
- The found results can be copied to the clipboard or saved to a text file that contains the paths (extension '.paths'), for further processing. You can also open such .paths files again in FAF.
- Integrate with Alfred, Keyboard Maestro and PopClip. See here for details.
- Hide and unhide individual files and folders (ctrl-click on the found items for a menu).
- Delete user-installed locked files that the Finder won't let you trash. (Note that some can't be deleted at first attempt and may require you to reboot the Mac first before trying again, while other files, especially those owned or managed by macOS, can never be deleted due to Apple's security model).
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Search Examples
Have you just installed or launched a program for the first time and like to see what it modified or added to your disks? Here's a way to do that (it excludes .DS_Store files from the results because they're not really relevant to this question):
Searching for files only inside your Music folder that are neither in AAC nor in MP3 format and which are at least a megabyte in size? You would enter two Name criteria as follows, along with a minimum size. Also note that the search is limited explicitly to the Music folder:
Or you might want to find all Numbers documents from 2018:
To learn more about Find Any File's many features, see the manual.
Alternatives to Find Any File
While I appreciate hearing from a happy user, especially if (s)he sends me some money for it, even Find Any File is neither perfect nor to everyone's taste.Therefore, I like to refer you to some other programs that offer similar features.I hope one of them suits your needs. If not, you can always ask me, maybe I can help :)
A popular alternative to FAF is EasyFind by DEVONtechnologies. It offers a different search interface and has a single-window user interface which you might prefer. And it's free.
Another alternative is Scherlokk. It has a single-window search interface similar to EasyFind, which you may find more intuitive.
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Then there is ProFind. It has a lot of features I have long planned for FAF, such as caching the file system contents for faster lookup and AppleScript support.
If you want to search for your documents mainly for their textual content, especially if it's formatted text from Word, Pages, Excel, or in a PDF, take a look at HoudahSpot and Tembo. While they relies on the Spotlight engine, they give you more control over the search, similar to FAF, and also display the found items much better.
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If you primarily search media files such as videos, photos, or audio files, NeoFinder might be the right tool for you. It permanently catalogues your files, even those that may be stored on other disks or FTP servers that are not always attached, and keeps even detailed information about your image properties (EXIF data etc.), thumbnails, XMP data, and more.
For searching file servers, especially in larger (business) network environments, have a look at FotTrot Search.It's costly but may be better suited for professional use as it lets you search document content quite fast and efficiently(it's actually using Spotlight's importer technology to scan the server contents).
To see which files, applications and folders occupy the most space on your disk (FAF can't search for app sizes, only for regular file sizes), consider DaisyDisk.
And if you're using Microsoft Windows, check out Everything by voidtools.
Safari User Guide
Download music, PDFs, software, and other items by clicking links on webpages.
Important: If a download contains software, an alert appears when you open the item. To be safe, don’t open it if you weren’t expecting a software program or if it’s not from a trusted source.
Download an item
In the Safari app on your Mac, click anything identified as a download link, or Control-click an image or other object on the page.
Choose Download Linked File. (Some webpage items can’t be downloaded.)
Safari decompresses files such as .zip files after it downloads them.
Note: If you download an item that you previously downloaded, Safari removes the older duplicate so it doesn’t take up space on your Mac. See Optimize storage space on your Mac.
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See items you downloaded
In the Safari app on your Mac, click the Show Downloads button near the top-right corner of the Safari window.
The button isn’t shown if the downloads list is empty.
Do any of the following:
Pause a download: Click the Stop button to the right of the filename in the downloads list. To resume, click the Resume button .
Find a downloaded item on your Mac: Click the magnifying glass next to the filename in the downloads list. If you move a file or change the download location after downloading it, Safari can’t find the file.
Tip: To change where downloaded items are saved on your Mac, choose Safari > Preferences, click General, then click the “File download location” pop-up menu and choose a location.
Clear the downloads list: In the downloads list, click Clear. To remove one item, Control-click it, then choose Remove From List.
By default, Safari automatically removes an item after one day. To change when items are automatically removed, choose Safari > Preferences, click General, then click the “Remove download list items” pop-up menu and choose an option.