SubscribeLeopard: Prevent Spotlight From Searching Certain Folders
Posted on Jan 12, 2008 under Mac Tips |Don’t want Spotlight to search certain folders on your Mac? Here’s how to stop it from searching them in Mac OS X Leopard.
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Open Spotlight in the Personal section.
3. Click Privacy.
4. In the area for Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations: Click the plus sign (+) and select the folder you wish to exclude from Spotlight. Alternately you can drag and drop folders into this list as well.
by jeff, on February 16 2008 @ 10:18 pm
But did you know that the the folders marked for privacy are viewable to other user accounts (I verified this when using a guest account) when they select the spotlight pref pane in system prefs, and in fact can be removed from the list by a guest account user.
Fortunately, it doesn’t make the private folders accessible to the guest account user, but the changes do take effect when you log back into the user account where the folders were marked private, that is they’re now searchable.