Coming from Windows
Design work generates the worst possible filenames and the largest files. Both make search harder in specific ways.
logo-final.ai, logo-final-v2.ai, logo-FINAL-approved.ai, logo-final-v2-USE-THIS.ai. Searching logo returns all of them with no useful ranking.
Two things help: sorting by modification date rather than relevance, and searching for the common stem then filtering by date. A search that can express logo dm:<30d in one line answers "the one I was working on recently" directly.
Sketch libraries, Figma local caches, Adobe Creative Cloud files and Photos libraries are packages or containers. Their contents are not separate search results, and much of it lives in ~/Library where Spotlight will not look.
find ~ -type f -size +500M \( -iname "*.psd" -o -iname "*.ai" -o -iname "*.sketch" \
-o -iname "*.mov" \) 2>/dev/null -exec du -sh {} \; | sort -hrDesign Macs fill up faster than any other kind. Layered PSDs and video comps are usually the answer.
Fonts live in three Library folders plus Adobe's own. Finding which file provides a family is covered in the fonts article; the short version is Font Book → Reveal in Finder.
Finished projects go to an external drive, and then become unfindable the moment it is unplugged. This is the single most common search complaint from people doing client work, and the only real fix is a tool that keeps unmounted volumes in its index.
Date-prefix project folders — 2026-07-client-name — and the sort order does your organising for you. It also makes date-range searches trivial.
They are packages or app containers. Open with Show Package Contents, or search with a tool that indexes inside packages.
Spotlight forgets a volume once it is unmounted. Only a tool that retains unmounted volumes can search it.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
Download for Mac