In Apple’s macOS, a Spotlight is a powerful tool that provides instant search capabilities for any content on Mac devices. By default, the tool searches for content in all files and folders on the system.
But what if you want to keep the content private, but also want to exclude certain folders from the search results? Well, there is a way to exclude certain locations from the Spotlight search.
In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to add folders and files to the exclusion list so that whenever you use the Spotlight tool to search for content on your Mac, these locations will be excluded.
Exclude folders from Spotlight search in macOS:
Step 1: Open System Preferences on your macOS system. For this, click on the Apple icon at the upper-left corner, and from the options, select System Preferences.
Step 2: Now, in “System Preferences”, click “Spotlight”.
Step 3: In the options for Spotlight, go to the “Privacy” tab. Now, click on the “plus” button (“+”) to add the folder that you don’t want to include for search.
Step 4: Browse for the folder and after selecting, tap on the “Choose” button.
Now, the selected folder will be added to the Spotlight exclusion list. You can continue to add more and more folders and files to this list following the same steps. Now, whenever you search for anything in Spotlight, the Mac will not display the contents of the folders added to the exclusion list.
