Set what is searched in a Finder Window

When you do a search through a Finder window, instead of searching that Finder window, what the Mac does by default is it searches your entire Mac. So let’s say you had a folder open. You want to search that folder. When you go to the search in a Finder window for that folder, it’s going to search the entire Mac, not just that folder. This is the default behavior of the Mac. Well, we can change that. We can change it to search the folder by default. Let’s see how we can set what our Mac searches by default in a Finder window. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s open up a new Finder window. When we do a search, if we go to the upper right-hand corner, you’re going to see search here; when we search within a Finder window, what it’s going to do is it’s going to search the entire Mac. So, in addition to searching this folder here, Dan’s tutorials, it’s also going to search your entire Mac.

Let’s go and open up my Documents folder. If I were to search here, what it would do is it would search my entire Mac, not my Documents folder. Let’s see what I mean. I know I have this file here, appointments, but let’s go and search for it anyway. I go over to search here, and then I type in appointments. Watch what happens. It searches my entire Mac, not just my Documents folder. So I’m going to see more results here than what is in my documents folder.

If I want to search the Documents folder only, then what I do is I click on Documents here, and now it is only searching my Documents folder. I want to search the Mac again, I click On this Mac, and now it’s searching my entire Mac.

Well, instead of searching and then clicking on documents to search a folder. What you can do is have it search; when you click up in the search bar here, you can have a search your folder by default. So then it will no longer search this Mac by default; it’ll search documents by default.

How do we do that? Well, let’s go ahead and click on this to cancel our search. Now, what we need to do is we need to go up to our Finder preferences. So I go up under Finder in the menu bar, and then we go over to Preferences. From here, what we need to do is go to advanced. Under advanced, you’re going to see at the bottom here When Performing a Search. This is where we set what we want our Mac to do when we perform a search. And you’re going to see it as set to Search this Mac. Now all I have to do is just select Search the Current Folder, and then when I close this when I go back over to search here, and I search for appointments, it only shows me that one file under Documents because it is searching documents, not this Mac.

If I want to search the Mac, I can always go back up under this Mac and search the entire Mac again. But now, by default, when I search in a Finder window, it’s going to search my current folder, in my case, my Documents folder. So let’s cancel this. Let’s go over to my Downloads folder double-click on Downloads. I have a file called Handbrake. Let’s just go ahead and search for it. So I go over to the right, I click on search, I type in here Handbrake, and by default, it searches the Downloads folder because that’s what I have open. If I want to search the entire Mac, I click on This Mac.

So that’s how we can set what we’re searching when we search in a Finder window by default. We just go to our Finder preferences, and under Advanced, you’re going to see When Performing a Search. From there, you select what you want your Mac to do when you’re performing a search from a Finder window. By default, it is going to search the entire Mac. But you can change that to search your current folder or even use your previous search scope. In most cases, you’re just going to want to search the current folder. When you do that when you search, it’s going to search your current folder first, but then you can always go to this Mac if you want.

So that’s how you can set while your Mac searches when performing a search in a Finder window.