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Use Quick Look to Preview Spotlight Results in Ventura

When you search using Spotlight on the Mac, it provides a decent amount of information about each result, including name and other metadata. But what if you want to see what’s behind the search result? In macOS 13 Ventura, Apple added Quick Look support to Spotlight so you can easily preview the search results. Do a search, click or use the arrow keys to select a search result, and then press the Space bar to open it in a Quick Look window. It even renders websites!

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Nastco)

Having Trouble Finding Files on Your Mac? Here’s How to Reset Spotlight

For the most part, Spotlight works well. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term. Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. To fix the problem, you can force Spotlight to rebuild its index. (Don’t do this unless it’s necessary since reindexing can take a long time and may impact the performance of your Mac while it’s happening.) Open System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and then drag your drive (or the drive on which Spotlight isn’t finding files) into the list of locations that Spotlight shouldn’t search. That deletes the old Spotlight index. Still working in the Spotlight Privacy list, select the drive and click the – button below the list. Spotlight now reindexes the contents of the drive and should find your files properly in the future.

(Featured image by cottonbro from Pexels)