How to Search Within .zip Files in Spotlight

This brief tutorial will walk you through the steps involved in installing and using/understanding Ziplight, a plugin that enables Spotlight to search within .zip files.

1. Download and open Ziplight. Inside the .dmg you should see a file named Ziplight.mdimporter.


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2. Drag that file to your /Library/Spotlight folder if you want all users to be able to use this plugin, or ~/Library/Spotlight if you want only your account to be able to use it.


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3. To enable the plugin, you’ll need to either log out of your Mac and log back in again, or reboot.

   Now you have to wait a while as Spotlight updates its database. Eventually (after about 30 minutes for me) when you perform a Spotlight search, files inside of .zip files will begin to appear in your search results. NOTE: Ziplight won’t enable Spotlight to index the actual contents of the files inside of .zips, just the titles of the files inside .zips.

4. As illustrated in the screenshot above, I performed a search for the word “setlists” in Spotlight. One of the results was a zip file titled sl.zip. Opening sl.zip reveals that a number of the files contained the word “setlists”.


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