Quick Search on External Drives

[jscowsert]

Running a quick search in PM only gives results on my local drive.  Is there a way to include searches on external drives as well.  I'm using a Macbook Pro with OS-X 10.4+
Thanks,
Jim

[Kirk Baker]

Jim,

Running a quick search in PM only gives results on my local drive.  Is there a way to include searches on external drives as well.  I'm using a Macbook Pro with OS-X 10.4+

If you can get Spotlight to index your other drives, then you should begin to get search results in PM from those drives as well.

-Kirk

[Bredero]

Although the message is dated, I have a follow-up question;

do I understand correctly that PM has no options to read from an external drive, or work with it?

I would like to use the (PM Plus)Navigator to go to my NAS, where I have over 10 years of archives. It happens that I want/need to edit results again.
Now, I have to copy the results of a previous assignment to my local drive first to 'see' them in the Navigator. It would be nice if I no longer had to do this step…

Cheers-Gerrit

[Kirk Baker]

Although the message is dated, I have a follow-up question;

do I understand correctly that PM has no options to read from an external drive, or work with it?

No, but it depends on what you mean by no options.  PM works with external drives and NAS drives for most functions.  The question was about the Spotlight-powered search facility provided by Apple in macOS that PM uses to allow searching.  Spotlight doesn't index (build a database) for all drives connected to your Mac.

I would like to use the (PM Plus)Navigator to go to my NAS, where I have over 10 years of archives. It happens that I want/need to edit results again.
Now, I have to copy the results of a previous assignment to my local drive first to 'see' them in the Navigator. It would be nice if I no longer had to do this step…

You shouldn't have to do any copying.  You should be able browse photos on your NAS via the Navigator, Favorites, File->Open Contact Sheet, Finder drag and drop, etc.  You should also be able to add photos from your NAS to your Photo Mechanic Plus catalogs and search them if you want.

Does your NAS's volumes not show up in the Navigator?

I suspect that you haven't given Photo Mechanic Plus permission to access all of your drives.  Please see:

https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48001152686-unable-to-ingest-or-access-folders-in-navigator

HTH,

-Kirk

[ahoward]

Also to clear up some potential confusion: "Quick Search" Photo Mechanic Plus is a completely different feature than the thing that the original poster of this thread is calling Quick search in whichever version of Photo Mechanic the original poster was using in 2008. The equivalent feature to what OP was asking about is now called "Search my Mac".