All Mac® computers have a fast and efficient search tool called Spotlight. It enables the user to search important criteria, not just the file names. For example, you can search for a file whose width is greater than 3000 pixels and resolution is greater than 300 dpi, or perhaps search for designs with your company’s copyright.
The Mac® operating system (Mac®OS) does not know how to find this information by itself as it is not aware of the structure of AVA file formats. In order to accomplish this, AVA contains a Spotlight Importer that allows the operating system to extract this specific information from .ava4 file formats, enabling the operating system to search on the information which is provided to it.
Note: When you first install AVA, Spotlight will start to index files from your system and this operation may take some time to complete.
The good news is you simply need to use the Spotlight search user interface in Finder and the rest of the indexing is done automatically for you.
The design name, reference, author and copyright information among others are extracted from the information typed into the Notes window in AVA. The rest of the information (such as width, height, resolution etc) comes from the corresponding file dimensions.
If you think there is some other information stored within the .ava4 file format which you would like to search for, then please submit a development idea to our Technical Support Team, and we will look into the possibilities of adding this in a future release.
To perform a search using Spotlight
- Click on the Magnify Tool in the very top right of your Mac®s Menu Bar.
- The following window will open.
- Enter your keywords such as the copyright name, design name, or author applied using the Notes feature in the spotlight window that appears. A sheet will appear, showing a list of items matching your search text.
- Simply double click on any of the listed documents to open them into AVA.